A few months ago, back around the winter holidays, I played through The Stanley Parable for the first time. It was one of those games that I’d had on my Steam wishlist for a very long time and just never got around to actually buying or playing it. In fact, my general interest in the game is what led me to be so interested in one of my most anticipated games of 2025, Wanderstop. Sure, the trailer was great, but I’d been intrigued by the premises of the games that the creator of Wanderstop’s studio, Davey Wreden, had already made and so took a closer look at Wanderstop. Without that, I might have written off the bits I’d seen of the Wanderstop trailer as just another cozy game and ignored it, given how much I both love and hate cozy games these days (love chore-based games but hate the aesthetic that often gets stuff labeled “cozy” these days). But, despite my intrigue, it still took me a while to actually sit down and play the game since I’d heard that it’s a game best experienced all at once and I just didn’t have it in me to stay engaged with anything like that (other than Dragon Age, anyway) until just about the start of the new year. So, thanks to the rest I’d been getting and the need for something to do that didn’t take a lot of manual dexterity (I wasn’t able to do much with my left hand thanks to the burns I’d gotten while making my Christmas dinner), I booted the game up and spent a good few hours playing through it.

The general premise of the game is simple: you control the character Stanley as a narrator directs you through a story about Stanley’s strange day at the office. The game immediately gets more complicated from there, though, because you’re fully in control of Stanley and while there are some limitations on what you can do with Stanley (he is, after all, an office worker and not an action hero), you’re free to explore the space and follow or ignore the narrator’s directions. Then, based on what you do (with surprisingly few limitations), the narrator’s voice responds, reacts, or even castigates you for what you’re doing. You explore through the level, follow instructions or don’t, and then eventually reach some kind of end. Once you reach that end, the game wraps up the story it’s been telling, and then fades back in to the beginning of the game again, except this time the narrator remembers what you did. So if, like me, you decided to be as perverse and uncooperative as possible, the narrator begins to hold a grudge against you. Also, if you follow the story for a little bit and then bail out early-on, you might see some areas that you’ll never see again! There’s a whole lot of stuff that can happen, some of of which I never saw and might never see unless I somehow delete my save data, so I have no idea what you might encounter as you play through this game!

All I know is that I had a blast doing it. I immediately ignored the instructions I was given, messed with as much stuff as possible, ran in every possible direction, and did my best to spite the narrator such that it was almost four hours before I eventually reached the “end” of the original story. I won’t go into the details of everything I ran into because it’s genuinely worth it to experience that stuff yourself, but let’s just say that I got into the expanded content WELL before I actually experienced even half of the base content and my experience was still flawless and smooth, even if I’m pretty sure that the rooms would have been different if I’d done it all “properly” the first time. There’s only so much game in there, I’m sure, but there was enough to keep me occupied and enjoying myself for about five and a half consecutive hours (with breaks to change my laundry around and grab something to eat).

Generally speaking, this game will probably appeal to you if you’re interested in the line between player and game and how narrative structures can be subverted mechanically but upheld as a whole despite being subverted at the micro level. This game still tells a whole cohesive story, but it does so by breaking the whole thing down into pieces that you essentially mix and match yourself, building a full narrative out of the pieces that come together based on how you play the game. At least, it build something resembling a narrative. A lot of what’s there in the game is just the fun of messing with the narrator and the way the world changes to reflect your actions. There’s no deep meaning here, no hidden themes waiting to be gleaned. What you see is largely what you get: story/destiny versus self-determination and free will. Storytelling as only a video game could do it. An exercise in the form rather than something necessarily making a specific statement. I mean, I’m sure Wreden has some thoughts and feelings about the game, but I’d be completely unable to guess what they are and, frankly, unwilling to. What I got out of it was a fun thought exercise in what it means to tell a story in a video game and how I, the player, am just as important to the story as the narrator and the character in the game. Can’t have a game without players, after all. And I can’t recommend this game highly enough if any of this sounded interesting to you.