#THE STANLEY PARABLE MODS HOW TO#
#THE STANLEY PARABLE MODS MOD#

#THE STANLEY PARABLE MODS MOD#

The following year, Alex Aagaard would speculate whether The Stanley Parable brought videogames closer to artistic recognition, saying TSP showcases videogames’ “true potential.” And lastly, Miguel Penabella conducted a compare/contrast exercise between the TSP mod and Dear Esther for Medium Difficulty, drawing on player choice and narrative implementation as variables. “ It’s an uncomfortable train of thought because we want to believe that there is a freedom in games that is not in other stories, but in reality, it is only the freedom to fail to tell the story, either by dying and having to start over or by quitting and not playing anymore.” On PopMatters, Aaron Poppleton pondered the significance of player agency, or lack thereof, in the TSP mod. But then people were like, ‘I love how it tells you to push buttons but it doesn’t actually respond to your input!’ That actually was the benefit of designing a ‘broken’ game.”

#THE STANLEY PARABLE MODS HOW TO#

“For example, when you go through the red door, I originally tried to bind keys to actions in the world so that the screen told you to do things and then it had a response, but I couldn’t figure out how to bind keys, so I just flashed text on the screen and nothing happened. “It shouldn’t have worked,” he admitted, pointing out that many reviews laud things that he thinks of as unfinished or broken. Over at Kotaku, Kirk Hamilton also interviewed Davey Wreden about the mod, and may have indirectly confirmed some of Yang’s blog speculation. Yang also interviewed the TSP mod creator Davey Wreden for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, not pulling any punches on Wreden’s design choices and intentions before collaborating to build a Portal 2 “roundtable” level together. In a post on his blog, Robert Yang offers a quick rundown of the parts of the mod that he found interesting, including a roughness and a blandness to the environmental design that reinforces its artificiality and speculation that the audio files are hidden away to stifle snoopers from discovering the game’s secrets prior to playing. So, to begin in 2011, Filipe Salgado reviewed the mod for Kill Screen ( archived link ), interpreting it chiefly as a joke that “works because it’s surprising, and just like a joke, dissecting it drains its power.” This is a running sentiment through much of the writing about TSP, including pieces featured in this compilation: the suggestion that players should experience the game firsthand before reading too much about it, for risk of spoiling the game’s many surprises. Although the 2013 release would rework and expand the scale of TSP, the mod first established those same frameworks and narrative conceits the remake became known for.

Though the vast majority of works featured in this compilation are about the 2013 standalone “HD remake” of The Stanley Parable, it is vital to note the game’s initial release as a Source engine mod in 2011. In any given situation, will you follow instruction or disobey, and what will the consequences be for either? THE MOD This pivotal moment sets up the core loop of The Stanley Parable. The most iconic moment in the game comes early on, where the player, as Stanley, comes upon a pair of doors and the narrator announces, “Stanley took the door on the left.” At this point the player must choose whether to follow through on the prescribed story or defy the narrator and choose the alternative option. Released in 2013, The Stanley Parable was widely covered in reviews and critical features as well as YouTube walkthroughs and let’s plays. You can’t exactly beat it, it has no easily discernible challenge, and it can diverge intentionally into what traditionally would be labelled as “bad design.”Īnd yet The Stanley Parable’s hammy omniscient narrator and firm grasp of videogame vernacular ultimately granted it mainstream appeal. You can follow him on Twitter Stanley Parable is a game about game design –a so-labelled “walking simulator” that distills videogame storytelling into its vital component parts, lays them bare, and then asks why you’re even playing it. In 2018, he coordinated and designed the DED LED compilation project, preserving a set of videogame criticism from 50 contributing writers. Dan Solberg is an interdisciplinary artist, freelance writer, and digital media professor, producing works about videogames, music, and art.

Critical Distance is proud to present this Critical Compilation on one of the most influential independent games of the last decade, The Stanley Parable, brought together by Dan Solberg.

The stanley parable mods