Indie Rock: The Stanley Parable Demonstration

Some of you will be apprehensive to play The Stanley Parable Demonstration because you’re scared of taking risks, the kind of person that will happily join their friends on a skydiving trip but wouldn’t dare jump out the plane. A wilting flower, prepared to remain in the dark rather than stretch somewhat closer to the sun. A boring nerd.

Some of you might relish the experience of the completed game and not want it marred by having to repeat the same content over, which I get, so I’m here to tell you not to worry. The Stanley Parable Demonstration is a completely separate experience from the full game that shares nothing but tone. It’s designed in a way to heighten your expectations from the real release without spoiling anything.

And I want to talk about it openly, frankly, turning my chair backwards so that I’m more relatable to you (we’re all adults here, we can drop the “sirs”). I’ll prattle on about the game in a way that benefits from you having finished it first, so please come back when you’re done!

Okay. Cool.

Everything in the game follows the idea of a disconnect. There’s a disparity to what you’re doing and what you’re told you’re doing. There’s the constant suggestion that you’re making a choice when you rarely ever can. You’re playing a game, but you’re being reminded that nothing about it is particularly gamic. You’re playing something called a Demo, but it’s not demonstrative of anything you’ll see in the full release. You initially think you’re in a paused attract screen when you’ve been standing in gameplay for seconds already. Even the seemingly safe concept of actually getting to the demo at all is a topic of discussion. At one point you’d have called it Kafkaesque, before the word was stamped on by wankers.

In the same way that The Stanley Parable promises to be a game about games, The Stanley Parable is a demo about demos, which is a trite thing to spit out and I’m genuinely (flagellatory) sorry but that doesn’t stop it being true. There’s a note you can find in the demo creation facility, it’s on some crates as you walk out of the emotion booth room. It lists a bunch of key rules that a demo should stick to in order to be compelling, all of which would be true for most other games, but this demo decides to totally disregard them.

It’s a confident bellow, one that booms “Ha, you think that games are one thing? That the way we do things is the only way it can be done? What if Totally No.”

In the full game there’s the promise of branching paths and choices that result in different outcomes, which is something that this game gets you in the mood for by placing you in situations where you don’t actually know if your action or inaction is going to have a knock on. If you decide not to wait for your number to be called, for example, you won’t get a different ending, you’ll just have stood still unnecessarily in a way that shaped your experience.

I like that, I like a moment existing without a win-state, an activity that only benefits from what you’re willing to put in. I’m also way into tasks that don’t seem to have a win state totally having one; the wall you can’t walk through, for example, consists of you doing a thing and getting a nice bit of dialogue as a reward even if what you thought you were doing isn’t what you actually did.

Same goes for pushing either the Yes or the No buttons. You’re still registering an action and getting a response, despite you assuming it’d be a lot more straightforward.

I’m pretty sure the only time you’re asked explicitly to do something and the result is exactly as you’d expect is when you play the “put the cup in the bin” game, which is great. It reduces your entire purpose of being in this place down to just… cleaning away some litter, stopping briefly to push a button that says 8 on it.

The full game’s out on Thursday and you’re probably as ravenous as I am, but the difference between me and you is I’ve already got a copy and writing this is getting in the way of me playing it, so I’m just going to stop here. Goodbye!