For Christmas this year, I got a Steam gift certificate. I got it because the present my brother-in-law and his girlfriend had gotten me, turned out to have a bunch of problems that ended with them in the last minute, having to find me another present.
I still cannot thank them enough for this. Not that the other idea they had for at present was not very appreciated, but it turned out that this steam gift certificate, more than I had anticipated, was just what I needed. I had not actually bought any games for a long long time (years) because I somehow had gotten into my head that it was mostly my boyfriend that played games anyway (this is actually baffling that I would think that when you consider the fact that I met my boyfriend through an online game over 10 years ago).
Given this certificate, I all of a sudden had to think about what games I would want to play, and spend money on buying to play them, without factoring anything or anyone in, except me. It turned out that I had absolutely no problem with spending the money, and I quite readily knew what games I wanted, I had actually made a list in my head of games I wanted to try out. Therefore, I ended up with buying a nice short list of games and have already had my fun with some of them (and still have many playable hours left in many of them), and this is the story behind why this blog post ended up being about The Stanley Parable.
Because one of the games on the list that I bought was The Stanley Parable, and now I finally got around to actually playing it.
I had reasonably high hopes for it, since both Gametest (a very small-scale program with a bunch of people testing games) and Smagsdommerne (A danish program that invites the cultural elite of the Danish society to review different cultural products, from art exhibits to movie blockbusters) both liked it a lot, and recommended it. The fact that the trailer also looked interesting and this text “about the game” from their website captured my attention:
“The Stanley Parable is a first person exploration game. You will play as Stanley, and you will not play as Stanley. You will follow a story, you will not follow a story. You will have a choice, you will have no choice. The game will end, the game will never end. Contradiction follows contradiction, the rules of how games should work are broken, then broken again. This world was not made for you to understand.
But as you explore, slowly, meaning begins to arise, the paradoxes might start to make sense, perhaps you are powerful after all. The game is not here to fight you; it is inviting you to dance.”
A Hipster's Guide to the Galaxy... 