i have such mixed emotions about this game. i love the stanley parable. its been one of my favourite games for the past ten or so years since it released, and ive been following along with it, along with anything crowscrowscrows or davey wreden because im a fat chud. so there’s my credentials. rip the zone
i really really wanted to enjoy ultra deluxe. i was unreasonably excited for it, and i really tried to see the best in it at every turn. i dont think its necessarily the worst, or even bad. it’s attached to the stanley parable. it’d be hard for it to be awful, really. but even then, at most it’s only feels ‘attached.’ it doesn’t really feel the same. and that’s natural. the official release outside of the original mod was in 2013. humour and the context of game creation as a whole is different. which is exactly why i think this idea of creating ultra deluxe was so hard to pull off. the stanley parable as i and many others see it is a metanarrative about the relationships between games and developers, along with a lot of other things, but that’s what i believe is at its core. ultra deluxe seems aimless. i might be stupid, but i find it hard to tell you what it’s really about at i the end of the day, other than maybe the nature of sequels in gaming — but i feel as if it doesn’t have any new ground to tread on this topic. i think some parts of it are interesting. i love the skip button ending. [spoiler] i like the epilogue and the way it ends and you creating a new sequel every time you boot up the game. [/spoiler] from that alone, it seems as if it’s trying to be an ironic commentary on the nature of game sequels and remakes/rereleases and cash cows and things of that nature relating to games. but it doesn’t do it very well: just kicking mostly the same issues into the ground. you could say the bucket as a whole is also a part of this, but the irony of the entire bucket.. thing is genuinely too extreme for it to be genuinely self-aware in any sense.
i loathe that bucket. i don’t know if that’s an unpopular opinion because i’ve grown so uninterested in the new culture the game has cultivated, but i really, really do. it extends past meta irony into genuinely feeding into the problem you were making a commentary on in the first place, and doing a disservice to anybody that genuinely thought the creators of this game had anything to say in the first place. i respect the stanley parable so much. i respect the creators of it so much. i think the conception of the original game, and every single trailer, and the demonstration, and the game itself is so perfect. so what even is this? to make a separate version of every single ending to this game, including the new ones, and spending a large portion of your budget on it too, on a millenial-esque “i heart inanimate object el oh el” joke is frankly so ridiculous that it loops back around into being slightly funny again. i just can’t believe that this game genuinely exists. maybe that was the goal. or maybe i have too much faith in whatever crowsx3 find themselves doing. but either way it’s disheartening. it feels like it’s defiling to everything tsp was. the original knew when the jokes ended. the stanley parable was always a funny game, and i won’t discredit that, but jesus. i’m rambling about the same thing now, but i think it goes to show the intensity of how much i disagree with that decision and how ridiculous it is.
i enjoyed the endings outside of that. other than the skip ending and the epilogue, they were still a little lackluster to me, but ill take anything over that bucket. i don’t mean to sound like those people that never believe sequels or newer additions could ever hold up to the sanctity of the first but it’s just such a disheartening thing to witness. especially because i do genuinely see quite some love put into this game, especially with the epilogue, and expanding on employee 432–which i am very appreciative of—but it really just isn’t the same to me. that being said, i still recognise some of that love, and this still does have the stanley parable included, so i can’t in my heart give it a negative review. but i might come back and change my mind about it
edit i came back and changed my mind about it
