Stumbling through the Stanley Parable Demonstration

[davidn]

After a frankly suspicious amount of encouragement to try out the demo of The Stanley Parable, here it is! I go into the video knowing nothing of what the game is about. Frankly, I leave the video knowing nothing of what the game is about as well.

It's... a first-person game that does some things - that's about the limit of the information that I have at the moment. Oh - you're led around by the man who does the Tesco adverts, doing a voice that's somewhere halfway between Stephen Fry and Maaaahtin Jaaaahvis. The game is an interesting example of one that behaves like you're having a nightmare, losing control of itself and having you follow a set of dream logic where you're never sure where it's going, but played humorously enough that the feeling is... almost offset!

I think I'm going to go and lie down now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3UF_aIgKG4

Comments

[davidn]

It's fantastically reactive... they seem to have built in responses to the player doing a lot of different things (and importantly, NOT doing a lot of things), which makes it feel very natural and alive.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Indeed. It's kind of interesting how much things changed on my second playthrough, for example, when I waited for my number to come up the second time around, and again when I spent a good 10 minutes playing the Eight Game. Mr. Brighting was absolutely flabbergasted.

EDIT: Okay, so apparently it was only about 3 minutes. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBOsGTz4cSM) Hrm.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Actually, it was a smidge longer than 3...that guy missed a few lines of dialogue at the end of that lunacy.