izigame.me

I never played the original and only knew it as the "funny narrator game" when I got it. Going into it mostly blind, here are my thoughts:
Pros:
>The game has an excellent sense of humor and expertly wields the fourth wall in a way few other games (or other media, for that matter) do. It rarely felt like the game was overly winking and nudging at me or trying to make a big statement the way other fourth wall breaking games like Undertale do. It's almost like an inkblot test of a game; you can see it as either a goofy little romp about the protagonist defying the narrator and the world/story falling apart because of it, or as some larger piece analyzing everything from free will to mundane office culture. That being said I feel like some of the new content for the deluxe version was a little too meta for my taste, up to the narrator reading (real?) reviews of the original game and getting upset once he gets to the predominantly negative Steam reviews .
>It's insanely well put together. With very few exceptions (like the elevator in the boss' office), every new area and door you find and open will lead you somewhere new and put you on a different path, and as said above, the further you deviate from the "canon" path (where you follow the narrator's orders the whole time) the weirder the experience will get. That may sound obvious, but the sheer scope and execution of it all is what really makes this game work. Entering one different door well into one path can be the difference between an ending where Stanley is forced to kill himself to deny the narrator his fun or an ending where Stanley becomes a beta tester for a video game where you have to stop a baby from running into a fire. This, combined with the game's absurdist themes, is what gives the Stanley Parable its identity.
Cons:
>For as diverse and trippy as the game's multiple endings can get, after a while I felt like it made the game repetitive and lacking in objective. The charm and intrigue started to wear off for me around the two hour mark, which is dangerously short for a game this price. This was also around the time I started unlocking Ultra Deluxe's new content like the collectibles scattered throughout the game, which ironically the game mocks you for collecting . Theoretically this is what The Bucket is meant to remedy, as all of the games' routes get new dialogue from the narrator based on whether or not Stanley carries The Bucket around with him, , but of all the endings I took it along for, I don't think I ever noticed any super significant changes. If you die in one of the endings, you will die in the version of it with The Bucket (Then again, I could've also just gotten unlucky with what endings I chose for those runs). I think this could easily be remedied if there was some kind of ingame tracker of what endings you've already seen and what percentage of them you've found/still need to find. I feel like that would at least encourage me to go through and see everything the game has to offer.
>This game is mean with its achievements. Two of them in particular stand out to me: one for leaving the game running for 24 hours, but only on a Tuesday, and one where you come back to the game after not playing for ten years. That's insane! What confuses me the most about this is that there's a part fairly early on in the game that makes fun of achievement hunting which, depending on how you read the scene, comes off as the game either calling out stupidly complex achievements that offer next to no ingame reward or easy "gimme" achievements prominent in other indie titles on Steam. These achievements end up falling into both categories, since people are most likely going to just leave their computer on for 24 hours and alter their computer's clock to ten years into the future rather than proc'ing them the "right" way. And that's just annoying! There's no skill or exploration involved, it's just "would you rather mess with your computer's settings a bit or wait a literal decade to add this to your perfect games list?" Your mileage will definitely vary here, though, and if you don't care about achievements then this is a nonissue for you.
Overall, Stanley Parable is very, very good. I'd call it more an experience than a game, but it's a damn unique experience. Easy recommend.