Their intentions with Ultra Deluxe hinge upon it being an expansion of The Stanley Parable, not a separate entity. And yet, the developers of Crows Crows Crows elected not to do that. The original game still exists as it did before, at least until you open a door plainly labeled ‘New Content.’ Releasing the new elements of Ultra Deluxe on their own, and calling it The Stanley Parable 2, would surely have been a more sure-fire headline grabber. Ostensibly, Ultra Deluxe is an expansion to the original Stanley Parable, not a sequel. Ultra Deluxe takes all of these external market trends and filters them through the prism of The Stanley Parable’s signature wit to make something equally timely and timeless. While of course we still have plenty of single-player experiences and thoughtful, short-form games, the larger landscape of video gaming as an industry and an idea space has gone the way of Blade Runner billboards: bigger, brighter, and all-encompassing. From microtransactions to gacha pulls to concerts and canonical events in Star Wars happening in Fortnite, to everything regarding the metaverse, developers behind the most prominent titles have adopted a More is More approach. The advent of games-as-a-service and the business model of the modern game have changed how players interact with their games. Whether or not we’ve sufficiently changed in all this time, it’s much easier to identify how video games have changed. Have we as a culture learned anything new about video games, and who we are when we play them? You could write a whole We Didn’t Start the Fire about all the titles that have sought to pick up where The Stanley Parable left off in rolling the perennial “are video games art?” boulder uphill ad infinitum. In the ensuing near-decade, video games have done an awful lot of navel gazing, making games that are about games that are about media that are about games. While it wasn’t the first to take a meta spin on the medium’s typical conventions, it gained notoriety and critical acclaim for its deep layers of metafictional meaning. When The Stanley Parable released in 2013, it caught mainstream attention for its dense narrative examining the nature of free will and decision making in video games.
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