The Stanley Parable is a hard game for me to talk about.
When I was young, I tried the demo and hated it, it was a different period of my life and is one of the reasons I wanted to play it at some point.

Just a year ago or something like that I played The Beginners Guide and loved it, but I was still unsure about what to expect for this game.
My thought is that it would have been a metagame, but one of those you can find plenty, where the only thing you see and hear is "Hey player I'm the dev and I'm smart!".
I'm glad (?) I was wrong.

The Stanley Parable is indeed a metagame, and is indeed smart, at some point maybe too much, crossing the line to pretentious (which is anyway hard not to for these kinds of experience), but is also a game that made me understand very clearly how you can distinguish a game made just to make the dev feel smart, from another where the experience is so well made that you just forget about that because you are truly caught in it.

What I loved most about this game is how it presents you with so many different and creative paths and lets you choose and see what happens, be marveled with another surprising room and who knows what next.
The atmosphere, the visual, the audio, are so well crafted, I truly loved wandering in the office and exploring the possibilities.

But, of course, it would have not been the same without the narrator. This is the one thing that made me anxious the most.
It's easy to create a "clever" narrator with some humor that just end up feeling like an irritating pretentious voice explaining everything to the dumb player, but here the writing and the voice over are so well done that I really started to care for him, it felt like he was a partner in this journey, like we were friends playing together, annoying each other, it felt real.

As someone else said, you know that this is a game, but it really manages to let you dive into the illusion. This is something hard to achieve, and I think it is especially hard for a meta game since it constantly reminds you of the fact that you are playing.

After completing all the paths I've found, I had fun seeing the other endings by either watching them online or following a walkthrough. The amount of content is amazing, and for me the duration was perfect. Again, it has its moments where the narrator is "talking too much", making the "pretentious" side shine more, but I was so compelled that, even though I acknowledged that, I just didn't care.
This is something I consider a huge accomplishment.

You could also start to talk about the theme of it, and I've read a lot of interesting stuff. Some think it's about the illusion of choice, which it is to some extent, but I don't really buy it. The entire game is you making choices and the narrator being angry at them and trying to recover.
I think, like others, that it is more about how, as a developer, you have to acknowledge that the player exists, and deal with that. It is also a way to show how games can tell "more" through their interactivity, more than the "linear" story other media, like books or movies, are (mostly) restricted to. If not more, at least how this is a good thing.

I'm sure you can get more from it and it really shows how deep this game can be, and even though not everything may have been intended, I have this feeling that it's not just a coincidence. This is another thing that I guess helps in making this feel more than a clever but pretentious joke.

I also fell in love with the museum room, I loved they put a sort of way to make you see concept art and some behind the scene. It is something I wish every game had in some way or another inside itself.

After playing it I also went to replay the demo, and I've to say I don't really like it like the complete version (apart from the flashback part in the elevator which was really good). For me, the demo is too in your face about the meta part, while I think the complete game takes a more "delicate" approach. The demo felt like it was trying to make you know how clever the dev is, and was more a "bait" to make you play the game using weird stuff to appeal. There is indeed weird stuff in the game, but not so meta so quickly. It made me realize you have to take the time to make it so the experience doesn't feel pretentious.

I've also watched the trailers and they are very creative, especially the Raphael one. Even with them though they mostly pushed on the "weird" side of the game as a marketing factor, ending up being a bit too "clever". I don't feel like they really convey what the game is about, but I can also understand it would be hard to create a trailer trying not to spoil the complete experience.
Overall, I really appreciated their effort to create an experience around the real game through these trailers and the original demo, I think it is a good way to create something that feels more than what it is, and a good way to make it so your audience is already in the right mood to experience it.

I didn't expect to write this much about it though

Here's the thing.

Do you remember a kid in middle school, maybe high school, and they thought they were incredibly intelligent because they asked pseudo philosophical questions or made meta commentary on the existence of life itself? The Stanley Parable is that kid condensed into a game. Now, that isn't to say the game isn't intelligent. Certainly meta commentary about games inside of games has been a thing for a very long time, it's just that this game does it particularly well and with a very good sense of humor to boot. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it, but after getting most of the endings, I still sat there sort of...unfulfilled? And maybe that's part of the joke.

Early on in the game, the narrator himself says something along the lines of "what do they say? it's about the journey, not the destination." And yet, the game then goes on to be nothing but entirely destinations. It's ending after ending after ending, and it's exhausting, even if mildly entertaining the entire time throughout. Perhaps this is another joke, the fact that they say one thing then deliver another, but I don't know. As someone who doesn't care two bits about endings, this just is kind of frustrating. Ultimately, I'm left feeling underwhelmed and dissatisfied. I'm left feeling like the concept was so great and they could've done so much more with it, and then they...just...didn't.

But you know what I've realized? That's the point.

See, life itself is underwhelming and dissatisfying the majority of the time, not to mention ultimately pointless and your choices often don't matter one bit and what do you really get at the end of it all? You fucking die. Real great ending. No matter what choices you make, life still has a predetermined ending that you can't alter no matter what. The game isn't just making meta commentary on the state of video games, it's making meta commentary on the player itself, on life itself, on the nature of existence itself. Now that's something I can get more behind and chew on. There's something to that. As someone who enjoys, and often writes a lot of the same thing herself, nihilistic fiction, that sort of thing is right up my alley.

Hell, even your time playing the game is wasted because really what did you net out of it? A bunch of random endings? They played us like goddamned fools.

You are your unreliable narrator, or at least I know that I am. I dissociate often, I lost track of what year I'm in, and I'm pretty certifiably crazy for all intents and purposes. That makes making sense of my life pretty goddamned difficult a lot of the time, and sometimes it feels like I'm living the same day over and over and over again, because, really, I am. I wake up, I eat, I do my work, I relax, I eat, I go to sleep. Rinse and repeat. And this is how many of us function, too. We cycle through the same things, the same hallways, the same conversations, over and over and over again, not recognizing that we an unwitting candidate for the essence of nothingness. We ARE Stanley. Everything is ultimately preordained in one sense or another and we all are stuck in the same limiting meaningless path.

And now you're probably thinking "how the fuck is she gonna dig the review out of this weird hole?". Well, I'm not. Not really anyway. I recognize that I also don't function like a "normal" person. Whether it's because of my many mental instabilities, my minor brain damage or my autism, I certainly live life very differently than lots of other people. Hell, even very differently than lots of other people with the same issues as me. So maybe the fact that I'm stuck in the sort of rote cyclical existence that I am only further pushes how I feel about this game commenting on it, but either way it stung a bit, not gonna lie. The Stanley Parable has a "ending" where you do escape the office and you break free from it all and you follow the narrators story and you go outside and regain your freedom. It's humbling, sure, but it's also made all the more depressing when you think about what that ending truly means.

That means that in order to gain what someone considers "happiness", you have to do whatever they say. You have no choice. You're a cog in the machine, spinning tirelessly and effectually, like they knew you would. You have no autonomy, no opinion, no though process. If you want to get "happy", then take this medication. Listen to this doctor. Read this self help book. Listen to someone other than yourself because you don't know what's best for you, clearly. You're making all the wrong choices, that's how you ended up here, with all these problems. But I, of course, choose to reject that, for many obvious reasons. Sure, medications and doctors can help, but ultimately my reality is my reality, not someone telling a story about me.

And I get to decide where and when I attain happiness. Not them. Me.

And that means that the story goes on for as long as I want it to. I could kill myself, end it mid sentence, sure. But people crave closure. People need endings. I guess it's up to each of us to stay alive and give those endings to one another for as long as we can. To live for eachother. Not for the malevolent disembodied voice that tells us what they think we should do, but for ourselves, and the people we care about. The Stanley Parable isn't just telling you you're bad at the game, it's telling you you're bad at life.

And that's a good thing.

Being good at something is fucking boring.