How does one follow up a game that knows it’s a game?
With a sequel that knows it’s a sequel, of course.
In 2011, The Stanley Parable was released as a mod for Half Life 2. It was a self-aware experience centered on the idea of multiple endings. The player could choose their own path in spite of the narrator’s story. This version of The Stanley Parable had 6 unique endings.
In 2013, The Stanley Parable was released as a standalone game. It featured major graphical improvements, a more distinct artstyle, and 13 new endings in addition to the 6 original ones. The 2011 Stanley Parable was meta in the sense that it played off players’ rebelliousness and curiosity; The 2013 release took this self-awareness a step further, leveraging its status as a standalone game. The museum segment, for example, showcased custom assets created to replace the Half Life 2 ones.
Additionally, the Stanley Parable’s second release made use of its status as an already-popular piece of media. The aforementioned museum segment contained a slideshow of emails from fans—fans that only existed before the 2013 release due to the success of the 2011 mod. The second release also allowed the developers to react to how players played. The Broom Closet “ending,” for example, was a reaction to the observed player behavior of standing still and waiting unreasonable times in an attempt to exhaust all possible dialogue.
In 2022, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe was released as a standalone game. It featured 20 new endings in addition to the 19 in the previous release. This version, like its predecessor, was able to leverage its status as the successor to an existing game. The new content was gated behind a door labeled “New Content,” and the narrator acknowledged it outright. Planning ahead, the developers also preemptively mocked critics of Ultra Deluxe by having the narrator scoff at the underwhelming nature of the new content.
Ultra Deluxe also leveraged the popularity of The Stanley Parable. In one section, the narrator gathered Stanley’s “friends,” which consisted of a collection of fan-favorite objects and events from the 2013 release: the Adventure Line, the broom closet, the fern, the crying baby, etc. Expanding on the prior usage of fan emails, Ultra Deluxe also made heavy usage of the criticism, acclaim, and Steam reviews garnered from the 2013 version.
Furthermore, Ultra Deluxe subverted players’ expectations of the nature of the added content. Instead of the addition of new doors or branching hallways as one might’ve expected, much of the new content actually followed the exact same paths as existing endings, but with a bucket added. This too was another subversion, as despite the (mostly) identical paths, the bucket vastly changed the nature of these paths through the narration.
