The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is an expanded reimagining of the 2013 first-person exploration game, with everything from the original preserved and a substantial new layer of content layered over it. The setup is unchanged: Stanley, an office worker whose only job is to press buttons in the order he's told, discovers one day that all of his co-workers have vanished, and goes looking for an explanation. Kevan Brighting's omniscient narrator follows him every step of the way, with opinions about what Stanley should be doing.

The game's central trick — choice, the appearance of choice, the rules of how games communicate intent — is left intact, and the original network of endings, contradictions and self-referential dead ends is still there to be found by players who never reached them. Ultra Deluxe extends that labyrinth with new content, new choices and new secrets, much of which is built specifically around the premise that you (or the wider audience) have played The Stanley Parable before. The new material has opinions about that fact.

Visually the game has been upgraded to reflect modern hardware without losing the original's tone, which is roughly the level of preservation a faithful Ultra Deluxe needs. Accessibility additions cover localisation of in-world text, colourblind options and content warnings. What the game has always been about — the gap between what you're told you're doing and what you're actually doing — is now both about the original game and about the version of yourself who played it more than a decade ago.