no it's not

and cigarettes

That's not a cartoon. That's the brand for breakfast cereal and chewable multivitamins

Maybe that's an additional layer of meta-humor about sequels and DLC on its own, but I don't think making people less-engaged with your game should be what you want. Have them need to get a few more endings before they can see it, perhaps.

Man, what a weird first game to have to review.

I think if I were to offer technical criticism, it's that the game should separate the new players from returning veterans more. I've seen blind playthroughs that completely miss the joke of the new content because they didn't experience any separation between it and the original, and it falls flat.

It's weaponizing poe's law against me, and I have to respect it for that. Have a bunch of silly collectibles. Have a random love affair with the bucket. Who cares. It's a very cheerful, irreverent nihilism in this game.

Which is why it is FUCKING ANNOYING TO REVIEW, because that is ALSO the joke. It's a damn bucket that you hold, and that's your new content. "Here, take fuckin' whatever", says the game.

The bucket, that, when held, modifies the fifteen original game endings into weird new versions, that...kinda miss the mark in some cases? A lot of that biting game satire is replaced with absurdism, which is still funny, but doesn't feel as special.

But that's only part of it, they added that new museum, which was full of fun gags and weird little asides that only an auteur with no corporate oversight could make, and then...the bucket.

The self-indulgent Steam review stuff is funny, but goes on too long. But it's hard to even say that when it's next to The Skip Button, where Going On Too Long is the entire point, and you torture the narrator by traveling further and further forward in time until the earth is nothing but sand.

I like the original gag, that the game made you wait years for a remastered edition and then the new stuff is a concrete wall and a whiteboard saying "thanks for the money jackass", and then you get surprised by a whole other separate campaign after the game restarts.

So then, how is that "new content"? As in, that door labeled "new content" that you walk through to get to the new stuff?

It's okay.

The way playthroughs can vary so wildly in terms of emotions and tonal dissonance is intriguing. My only real complaint back in the day was that there wasn't enough of it. A central joke of Ultra Deluxe is that nobody was really ASKING for "More The Stanley Parable"...but I kinda was, haha.

I love The Stanley Parable, and the joke works for me, or at least it did back in 2013. I liked seeing all the choose your own adventure routes and messing with the narrator in different ways. There are loads of little interactions that only some players will ever see because of it.

So I guess the heads-up is that if you're not on-board with being condescended to and occasionally antagonized by a British man with an affable, slightly-sinister voice making sarcastic commentary on storytelling and narrative branching paths in video games, you'll find nothing of value here.

It's not like it has mechanics, y'know? You just walk around, and maybe you'll click something. The game even plays keyboard typing sounds when you click the mouse, even if you're not interacting with anything. 90% of the choices are just which door you walk through.

It's pretty hard to review The Stanley Parable, because it's so self-aware that doing so feels like a punchline unto itself. Case in point, this new version literally pulls up both real and fake reviews to take the piss out of.