[[If you have yet to play The Stanley Parable, please play it first. Go in blind. It’s a good time 🙂 ]]
I played The Stanley Parable for the first time the other night and had a fantastic time exploring new spaces with wonderfully witty commentary. I was going in completely blind so I was unsure as to whether there was a ‘final ending.’ Now, most of the iterations are independent; whichever ending I came to prior had no bearings on my current run. Each loop is a clean slate. That is, until I was on what people call the Confusion Route.
The Confusion Route comprises multiple iterations, pieced together by the narrator force restarting the loop, placing the player back to the beginning of a run. However, it is clear these runs are not independent, as the narrator has dialogue that references to previous loops. During this route, the bleed-through of prior knowledge and events made me reconsider whether my other runs were truly independent, or perhaps I missed small details of the mundane I brush over varying across loops. At the end of the Confusion Route, the narrator and player are faced with the knowledge that the game will restart once again, but this time, with the narrator losing all prior memories.
Even when blatantly told this information, that there was going to be a fresh reset, I couldn’t help but question whether the iterations I go through after this ending aren’t affected from the loops before. Going through that route set a precedent that could not be ignored in later runs, since the environment, the mechanics, and the narration were all the same. And with that, I unconsciously kept an eye out for minor differences in the most seemingly arbitrary things (did this mug always have ‘Mondays’ on it???), throwing me into a more obsessive mindset (which works great in a metagame like The Stanley Parable).
