He teases, mocks, gets bored or angry with you, whispers conspiratorially with you and – most importantly – tells you what to do to advance the story as you explore an office that’s terrifying in its dullness, from the uniform carpeting to the marketing platitudes on the whiteboards and generic nature paintings, almost everything stamped with a number. This narrator is not like Dear Esther’s florid, contemplative speaker, with his anecdotes about hermits and goats and poetry. One day, all of his coworkers disappear, leaving him to explore the office alone in the company of an avuncular narrator. You are Stanley, an obedient salaryman who spends his days obediently typing commands in a grey cubicle. The Stanley Parable starts in a standard cubicle in an artfully bland-looking office, cursor blinking on the screen of a beige monitor. I didn’t, as it happens, but this has a much more sophisticated version of that concept, no longer made of Half-Life assets and greatly expanded by creator Davey Wreden in collaboration with William Pugh. You might know The Stanley Parable from its 2011 iteration as a Half-Life 2 mod.

It’s funny, self-referential, surprising, and sometimes uncomfortable to play, a tale told not through one linear story but instead through many different branching paths that twists the illusion of control that video games work so hard to give us. Like Dear Esther and Thirty Flights of Loving, The Stanley Parable is an experiment with interactive narrative, another attempt to find a new form of storytelling unique to video games.

The stanley parable half life 2 mod