The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

A great extension of the original with the same charm. Now just have to wait 9 more years for the damn achievement cause I bought it on console at first when it came out. could have already ben 4 years into it but noooooooooo. Least I have a reason to make it to 40 now.

Overall a great, thought-provoking game! The broom closet ending was my faVOiRIte. Very well crafted, but the bucket endings get a bit repetitive.

It's trippy, hilarious, and delightfully weird; a video game version of the choose-your-own adventure books that were popular in the ancient Age before computers learned to talk to each other, where most information was stored by defiling the mangled and mutilated bodies of dead trees with inked markings. You are Stanley, an unremarkable silent-protagonist schlub navigating an office building trying to figure out why all of your co-workers suddenly disappeared. Your constant companion, mentor, and nemesis is The Narrator™, an invisible voice who compensates for your complete silence with a near-constant stream of monologue that alternately guides and reacts to your actions in often-hilarious fashion. The "ultra deluxe" version adds a bunch of new endings and makes a few minor changes to the original version, notwithstanding the deliberate and hilarious undersell the "new content" gives you when it first shows up. All but 2 of original endings have an alternate version added, and there are a bunch of new ones added. The game is hilarious and thought-provoking, and isn't afraid to poke fun at itself and the video game industry in general. The writing is excellent, the voice acting is superb, and I didn't encounter any crashes or glitches. The only minor annoyance I encountered was with control configuration. It is possible to enable jumping outside the Jump Circle™ with One Weird Trick™ that I won't spoil, but when you do, jump and use/interact get mapped to the same controller button (which makes interacting with smaller things a PITA) and there doesn't seem to be any way to change that. If you play with keyboard and mouse, jump and use/interact are mapped to space and E respectively, which is far less annoying and more standard. Hardware demands are pretty modest. On my 13-year-old laptop with a crappy GTX 760M GPU, it will keep a fairly consistent 60FPS at 1080p (the native resolution of the laptop display) with high settings on every level but one, which runs at 25-30FPS for maybe 3 minutes of total gameplay. On my newer laptop with an RTX 4070 mobile GPU, it runs at a solid 60FPS at 4K while only loading the GPU 30-50%. Bottom line: the game is very playable even on crap hardware.