Lilly Looking Through - Review

* Read this review as it originally appeared in the November 2013 issue of Adventure Lantern.

Lilly Looking Through is the creative effort of husband-and-wife team Steve and Jessica Hoogendyk of Geeta Games. As fans of adventure games like Myst, Ico, and Beyond Good & Evil, Steve and Jessica wanted to create an adventure game that could be enjoyed by all ages. A successful campaign on Kickstarter allowed them to see that goal through to fruition, leaving us with the wonderfully charming game that we have today. With much of the game's development inspired by their daughters, you can tell that Lilly Looking Through was a true labor of love.

Lilly Looking Through takes the form of a point-and-click adventure game following the young protagonist, Lilly, as she attempts to catch up to her younger brother, Row, after he's whisked away by a red scarf-like fabric in the wind. The world in which these two siblings inhabit seems to be relatively primitive; the opening scene features round, wooden cottages along a lakeside buried deep in the woods with gas-powered lanterns illuminating wooden walkways. As Lilly ventures forth in search of Row, we're treated to imagery of run-down, abandoned bits of technology, seeming to suggest that this world has regressed to a simpler time after experiencing an era of prosperity and technological growth.

It should be noted that there is quite literally no storytelling in this game. There are no drawn-out cutscenes, crawling text messages, or dialogue sequences to inform you of this world's backstory or what's presently happening to Lilly and Row. The game's basic premise (catch up to Row) is just that -- a premise. It's actually kind of refreshing to play a game that doesn't feel the need to spell everything out for you, and which just allows you to enjoy its atmosphere and presentation in near total purity. The minimalistic characterization of Lilly and Row, depicted solely through their actions, the way they carry themselves, and occasional vocalizations, is enough to make them endearing in their own childlike simplicity.

Lilly Looking Through is filled to the brim with magical whimsy. While it has many of the requisite elements to constitute a video game (a central premise, puzzles and problem-solving, sequential progression from beginning to end), it almost feels less like a video game and more like an experience. Since there's so little going on besides solving puzzles, much of the experience is just soaking yourself in the hand-painted scenery and the evocative music, and these two elements both prove very artistic in the most literal sense of the word. The puzzles are clever enough to be satisfying, making the actual gameplay worthwhile, but the aesthetic ambiance to be experienced in this game is what elevates it beyond just an engaging video game.

The game is comprised of 10 short "chapters," each basically consisting of one "scene" with puzzles that must be completed in order to move on to the next "scene." The puzzles are all tethered to the environment, always requiring you to interact with or manipulate some contraption; there are no items to be collected or combined in your inventory. At first these puzzles are relatively simple; drain water from a barrel and use it as a step-stool; use a cattail stem on a gas lamp to create a torch and then burn a rope holding up a drawbridge; operate a waterwheel and use it as an escalator. They're not terribly complicated or challenging, but they feel so organic and logical that they're a pleasure to solve.

As you advance through the game the puzzles become increasingly complex, with the final scene having you manipulate nearly ten different hotspots in a multi-step process. As admirable as their complexity might be, the puzzles in the second half of the game aren't always as satisfying to solve as those in the first. Some of the later puzzles are just too complicated for their own good and bog themselves down with trial-and-error. When dealing with some of the later contraptions it's a puzzle just to figure out what each lever and switch actually does, then it's a puzzle to figure out what you're expected to do, and then it's a puzzle to find the solution.

Sometimes it's a puzzle to figure out why a certain solution is, in fact, the solution. With one small puzzle, I apparently solved it before I even knew what I was doing because I happened to use the switches and levers in the correct order while simply trying to discern each one's purpose. On another puzzle I arrived at the solution through sheer accidental luck because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or what I was supposed to be doing. With certain particularly obscure puzzles you can get completely stumped because the game doesn't always give you feedback to hint you towards or away from your particular line of reasoning.

The process of trial-and-error isn't inherently a bad thing -- trial-and-error is precisely what makes puzzle-solving fun and rewarding -- but it becomes problematic when you're stuck watching long, slow animations between every single action. In the game's final puzzle, for instance, you have to maneuver a contraption to very precise points, a process that requires dozens of clicks, each time requiring you sit and wait while you watch animations you've already seen dozens of times. As delightful as it is to watch Lilly's movements throughout the game, it can really bog down the pacing and inflate the tedium in more complex puzzles where they only serve to slow down your process of arriving at the solution.

Early in Lilly's adventure she acquires a set of goggles that serve as the game's unique twist on the puzzles. When looking through the goggles, Lilly is able to see into the past, with the landscape changing around her to resemble what it once looked like. When you put on the goggles, run-down, dilapidated structures become pristine, almost futuristic-looking. Each scene has you switching back and forth, taking the goggles on and off, and using the differences between the two eras to your advantage. If you need something to climb up to an unreachable ledge in the present, you can switch to the past and plant a tree; when you take the goggles off, the tree will be fully grown and ready for you to climb. This mechanic becomes the central tool in each puzzle and it works remarkably well. Plus, it's great fun just seeing the differences between the two time states.

Although the goal for Lilly Looking Through was for it to be enjoyable for all audiences, I think some of the puzzles might go beyond the capacity of a young child. Younger audiences will surely be driven to the whimsical, childlike visual design, but I find it difficult to imagine a child having a firm enough grasp on how to mix colors of the rainbow by restricted addition and subtraction to solve some of the game's later puzzles. I learned all of that stuff back in kindergarten, and even knowing exactly what to do, it still required a fair amount of experimentation to come to the solution. Meanwhile, I can picture certain adults who'd be turned off by the game's whimsical, childlike design. It seems to me that this game might best be enjoyed when played together by a parent and child, so that the parent can solve the game's more devious puzzles while the child just enjoys the atmospheric journey.

What pains me the most about Lilly Looking Through, though, is its short length and abrupt ending. Sometimes games are at their best when they're short and sweet, striving to offer the most poignant possible experience without outstaying its welcome. With this game, I got between two and three hours out of it -- enough time to fill one afternoon while still being completed in one sitting. Ordinarily that would be fine, so long as it felt like a complete, wholesome experience, but the game's ending occurs so suddenly and with so little resolution that it leaves the whole game wanting for more, which in turn makes its short length into a major disappointment.

The idea, I guess, was to establish a cliffhanger ending that would leave audiences craving for another "chapter" of Lilly's adventure, but in this case it leaves the game we have feeling almost incomplete. This is a game that presents itself as a bit of an intriguing mystery; it makes you ask a lot of questions about its world, and then makes no effort to answer any of those questions. At the very end, it raises yet more questions, and right when it seems like you'll get some answers or have some kind of emotional payoff for Lilly and Row's adventure, something inexplicable happens and then the credits roll. Rather than ending with a wholesome, satisfying feeling, it left me feeling rather annoyed at what I'd just witnessed.

It's clear that a lot of love and effort went into Lilly Looking Through; its aesthetic design, the goggle mechanic, and the organic feel of its puzzles are all a delight to experience. The game is worth playing for those simple reasons, but unfortunately the overall experience feels mired and unsatisfying thanks to its short length and anti-climactic, abrupt ending. If the developers had focused on making the final payoff to this game more rewarding, instead of deliberately trying to leave holes open to be filled in a possible sequel or expansion, it could've been great. As it is, the good averages out with the bad.

Red Dead Redemption is Not That Great

I remember walking into a GameStop in the spring of 2010, intending to browse through their collection of old PS2 games in search of rare gems. When one of the employees saw me reading the back of the box for Gun, a western-themed shooter, he immediately launched into a sales pitch on Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar's latest western-themed sandbox game. I told him I wasn't interested, and even after explaining that I didn't even own a PS3 or Xbox 360, he continued on his rant, hyping up all its minigames and trying to get me to pre-order it.

A few months later, Red Dead Redemption was released to immense critical acclaim and went on to win numerous "Game of the Year" awards. It's currently the sixth and seventh-highest rated game on PS3 and Xbox 360, respectively. At the time, the allure of a western-themed sandbox game with tight action, tons of content, a great story, and a complex morality system was certainly very strong and had me seriously considering buying one of the consoles to be able to play RDR (among other console exclusives).

Three years later, I've finally played Red Dead Redemption, and as seems to be the case with nearly every critically-hyped mainstream game, I wasn't very impressed with it. Sure, RDR is a decently enjoyable experience with some good qualities in its favor, but it came far short of living up to its grand hype. The introductory area and missions were all quite good and really drew me into its world and atmosphere, but after a while the gameplay grew stale, boring, and tedious, while certain aspects of its overall design proved downright disappointing or outright frustrating.

The only things that RDR has going for it is that its shooting mechanics are functional, it has a great setting and atmosphere, and it has some very well-written and well-acted characters with cinematic-looking cutscenes. Most of the gameplay is competent and functional, but most of it also becomes incredibly repetitive and pointless the longer you play. The actual story is really not that good and bored me to death for the bulk of its slog through Mexico and West Elizabeth, regions that accommodate nearly two-thirds of the game's story.

The story in RDR is of John Marston, a former outlaw and gang member trying to put aside his life of crime and put down the men with whom he used to ride. When the government takes his wife and son hostage, John is left with no choice but to hunt down and kill his former gang members in order to ensure the safety of his family. Approximately 90% of the main missions consist of you tracking down the gang's leaders, and most of the time those missions are just you doing trivial, pointless favors for other characters to get them to assist you.

This format works well enough in the very beginning, when John is shot and left for dead outside of Fort Mercer by Bill Williamson, since that encounter with Williamson gives you a concrete reason to care about your goals, and a face to associate with your bounty target. Later on, however, when you're going after Javier Escuella and Dutch van der Linde, you really have no idea who these people are, and have no personal reason (as a player) to go after them, because they're just names -- a checklist towards completing the game. The act of pursuing them is simply not that interesting or exciting because there's no real weight behind it.

After a dozen quests helping other people, when it comes time for the showdown with Williamson at Fort Mercer, he somehow manages to escape in the chaos, requiring that you follow him to Mexico. That becomes the recurring pattern for RDR's missions: spend seemingly forever doing random favors for other people, all building towards a confrontation with your bounty target, only for them to escape and trigger a new string of favors to be completed elsewhere, before restarting the whole process with a new bounty target. The pacing is quite boring and meandering because it rarely feels like you're actually making progress towards your goals.

This pattern becomes particularly unbearable during the middle chunk of the game when you're in Mexico, when literally every mission is just an impediment to your own progress. While trying to catch up to Williamson and Escuella, you become involved in the Mexican civil war and end up basically fighting the entire war before anyone'll help you find Williamson or Escuella. It's during this time that we have to put up with John's wavering characterization, as he continues to be everyone else's bitch while making pointless, empty threats. After it's already been established that John has own Robin Hood-esque moral code, he's suddenly burning down villages and helping round up sex slaves for the Mexican dictator.

What makes the missions in Mexico even more unbearable is that they showcase how static and unresponsive the game's world actually is to your actions. Consider that the game forces you to do missions for both sides of the Mexican civil war -- burning down entire villages of rebels and murdering soldiers of the Mexican army -- and no one seems to care. After finishing one mission where I'd killed no less than 30 soldiers, I rode a short distance to the next outpost with a strong military presence, and was greeted with warm welcomes. The reason for all this inconsistency is because all of the main missions happen in an instanced version of the world -- nothing actually integrates with the ordinary gameplay.

Further exemplifying this detachment is the game's weird morality system. John Marston is generally a well-realized and likable protagonist; he has a fine balance of modesty and badass swagger, and he has that "chaotic good" personality that always makes for a pleasantly complex character. But while John has a set personality, you're also free to play as honorably or as dishonorably as you want -- you can be a thieving murderous bandit or a noble saint if you like, but no matter how you choose to role-play John Marston, odds are you'll eventually run into some moment in a cutscene or a main mission (where you have no control or choice) where John's actions will seemingly contradict your own playstyle.

Then you've got the numerous continuity errors that exist specifically because the missions don't integrate with the actual game world. At one point I did a mission where an entire ranch was slaughtered and I had to rescue the handful of survivors; after finishing that mission, I immediately went to another quest-giver who took us to that same ranch, less than five in-game hours later, and the entire ranch was completely repopulated. In another instance, I did a quest where I helped a ranch round up a herd of cattle before a heavy storm hit -- the mission ended in dark and stormy weather. I finished the mission and went to trigger the next mission in the series on the same ranch, and suddenly it was bright and sunny, and the rancher's father had apparently been missing for hours.

The mission structure gets to be pretty repetitive after a while, too. They're fairly varied and interesting in the beginning, giving you good enough reason to care about what you're doing, but once you get into Mexico they all start to follow the exact same pattern: you pick up the mission, you ride with an NPC to the destination, you kill some bad guys, then you ride to the next destination. They get to be quite boring and tedious once you realize you're going to spend most of the time with your hands off the controls watching cutscenes or listening to prolonged dialogue sequences while you ride shotgun in a wagon, only to be placed in a combat situation that plays virtually identically to every other combat situation in the game.

Missions are made even less satisfying by the fact that they tell you every little thing to do at every step of the way. There's so much hand-holding that there's absolutely no problem solving to be had, no satisfaction to be had from finding a solution on your own. When you start a quest, a marker shows up on your mini-map telling you where to go and a floating tutorial message tells you exactly what to do. When you do that, another map-marker and floating tutorial message pops up telling you exactly what to do next. Even at times when you have the ultimate goal to catch a fleeing suspect down a linear mining tunnel, the game pops up with markers telling you to climb obvious ladders.

There's absolutely no room for creativity within missions. The final mission for the Mexican portion of the game has you mounting an assault on the colonel's private villa, and the game forces you to take the linear path directly up to the front gate. When I tried exploring to the right of the path, I was met with a locked door and eventually failed the mission because I strayed too far from my allies. I then went around the ridge to the left and snuck up behind the gatling gunner near the front gate, took him out, and proceeded to mow everyone else down from behind. Once I'd done that, however, the game spawned a second "wave" of enemies on my flank, literally from out of nowhere, who killed me instantly. In a situation where I found a clever solution to a mission, I was actually punished for it and forced to go right up the middle, the only way the game was intended to be played.

Side-missions with strangers are much more interesting, although not always as involved. Sometimes they're as simple as traveling to a location, talking to an NPC, and then returning to the original NPC, or othertimes they require you to collect a bunch of plants or animal trophies and then return. But the actual content of these side-missions makes them worthwhile on their own; having an elderly woman outside a chapel tell you she's waiting for her beloved to show up for their wedding, only to find that he's been dead for decades, or tracking down a string of missing townsfolk only to find they've been kidnapped by cannibals. These side-missions are genuinely interesting to see through to their conclusions and go off into some dark, unexpected directions, but unfortunately there are only 19 of them and many of them aren't very long or complicated.

The random events that happen when you're out exploring the world, on the other hand, are boring as hell and offer zero variety whatsoever. They're fun at first because they make the world seem more dynamic and lived-in, but after a little while you realize they're all the exact same situation. Any time a lone stranger is out in the wilderness on foot asking for a ride, you can bet he'll pull you off your horse and try to ride off with it. Anytime a lone stranger approaches you on horseback, it'll be to help save his wife from hanging by a lynch mob. You can only stop for these people so many times before it gets boring and repetitive, and after a short while you stop helping random strangers completely.

The only real variety to be had in the gameplay is to play any of the game's various minigames, from five finger fillet to horseshoes to blackjack to Texas hold em to horse wrangling to liar's dice to street dueling to arm wrestling, but more than likely you'll only do any of these minigames once or twice before becoming bored with them. There's no real point to any of it except to earn money, and even if you're playing in hardcore mode, you'll accumulate more than enough money to buy anything you could ever need. Even if you're trying to earn money, why bother spending 20 minutes playing Texas hold 'em to win $50 when, in the same town, you can do a repeatable three-minute mission that will net you $60-80?

At random times, the game is incredibly finicky about bestowing the player with bullshit deaths. After finishing the mission to assault the colonel's villa, the game dropped me back outside the main gate while the auto-save icon displayed in the upper left corner. I whistled for my horse, and while waiting for it arrive and while the auto-save was still happening, a random NPC shot me in the back and killed me. "What the fuck," I said, reloaded the save (which fortunately went through) and returned to those exact same NPCs. They were not hostile, and didn't react after I whistled numerous times for my horse. So it seems the game glitched out and decided to kill me for no good reason whatsoever.

On another occasion, I was doing a mission for the Mexican army to burn down a village. First death: I accidentally shot a Mexican soldier, and less than two seconds later every single Mexican soldier turned and shot me. Second death: I approached the mission and encountered a random event with a guy being held at gunpoint; I shot the gunmen, lost honor, and was immediately killed by an unseen third guy. Third death: got to mission and got shot to death by a woman who didn't appear to be hostile. Fourth death: a stupid mistake on my part not using cover correctly. Fifth death: I finished the mission by burning a boat from a pier, and when I went to turn in place, John ran a small circle, fell into four feet of water, and died instantly. Sixth death: approached the mission and triggered a random event with a guy at a campfire asking me for food, and he shot me dead while I was waiting to figure out if I should be pressing a button to give him food or drawing my weapon in self-defense.

In another situation, I was out in the northern wilderness in densely packed trees. Up in the distance I spotted some horses by a campfire, so I took out my scoped rifle intending to scope out the situation to see if these were likely bandits who'd kill me on sight. Despite being about 100 yards away and virtually undetectable through the thick trees, the very act of aiming my weapon on them made them immediately hostile and aware of my location. So I went into combat mode, rode closer to their location, and was killed when the game glitched out by having Marston attempt to have sexual intercourse with a tree while I was attempting to take cover behind it.

I was playing in hardcore mode, you see, because in these kinds of open world games I always worry about the game becoming so easy that the sense of challenge and accomplishment disappears midway through. Reading comments on forums, it sounded like the game would inevitably become far too easy on normal mode, so I took the challenge and played in hardcore mode, which leaves very little room for error and leaves you quite vulnerable to being one-shot. But except for the combat, hardcore mode isn't all that difficult, despite the numerous changes implemented in the economy -- I still found myself rolling in money and constantly at a full supply of ammunition. I really wish hardcore mode emphasized survival more and forced you to manage your money and equipment more closely.

In terms of combat, about 60% of the game consists of cover-based shooting, maybe 30% consists of horse-mounted combat, and the last 10% consists of rail shooting sequences, and none of it is really all that good. The combat is functional and the Dead Eye system that allows you to enter slow-motion to mark targets before firing off a quick succession of shots is pretty fun, but there's not much depth or variety to the combat once you get into it.

With the cover-based shooting, for instance, nearly every single encounter plays out the same way: you press R1 to take cover behind a wall or obstacle, wait for enemies to pop their heads above their own cover, then shoot them in the face. If you get hit in the process, you wait behind cover long enough for health to regenerate automatically, then get back to shooting. It's a lot like playing whack-a-mole with guns, or doing a straightforward shooting gallery at a carnival arcade. Enemy AI is pretty basic, too -- they don't ever try to flank you or flush you from cover with grenades (or in this case, small sticks of dynamite) -- they just sit there like cannon fodder waiting to die. Hardcore mode doesn't even make it that challenging, it just makes it more tedious.

Horseback combat can be particularly frustrating in hardcore mode, when you consider that sometimes enemies can move faster than you can turn your aim. It's difficult to aim in general when both you and the target are moving at high speeds in alternating directions, and even harder to control the speed and direction of your house at the same time, so the lack of snap-to-target auto-aiming in hardcore mode nearly demands the use of Dead Eye. Horseback combat was practically unbearable until I'd learned to rely on Dead Eye and chewing tobacco, at least until I got a shotgun that didn't require as much frustratingly-precise aim. And gatling gun combat, my god, don't even get me started on the gatling gun. I hated every time I had to mount up on one of those things.

As an open-world game, you're generally free to go off exploring anywhere you like, but there's rarely any reward for doing so. You might find an interesting side-mission, but it's more than likely that you won't, seeing as many of them have a number of pre-requisites in order even to be available to find. Otherwise, with the exception of the fun and well-done buried treasure challenges, all you're ever likely to experience is pointless random encounters with wild animals or other human beings. There's no rewarding loot to be found, except for the rare chest containing $20 (which isn't worth the time investment), and whenever you find a small outpost, odds are you won't be able to interact with anyone or anything, anyway. All you ever do is look at your mini-map for icons, because if there isn't an icon you're basically not going to find anything worthwhile.

Other than that, my complaints are relatively small. It's way too bright at night; I can easily see all the way to the horizon, and wish there were more of a contrast in visibility and gameplay when playing at night. I wish the game had a better journal system for keeping track of quests and why map markers are important; I had to stop playing a week, and when I came back I struggled to get back into things because I'd progressed missions or picked up quests and forgotten what was going on in the meantime. I wish there were more of a survival aspect, like having to manage health with consumables and rest instead of having auto-regenning health and a more functional purpose for picking plants or hunting animals. I wish saving were easier and didn't advance the game ahead six hours. I wish I'd stop getting $20 bounties for accidentally bumping into an idiot bystander while trying to make a sharp turn on my horse.

The one thing that made the boring slogfest through the midsection of the game worthwhile was its ending. The actual story up until the point when you finally put Dutch van der Linde to rest and reunite with your family is not that inspiring and not that engaging, feeling entirely like stretched-out filler content. But it was such a refreshing change of pace near the end of the game to settle back into simple ranching missions, like the ones you did early on with Bonnie MacFarlane, where character development is the ultimate goal and you actually care about John Marston. After spending ~30 hours murdering literally a thousand different people, it was nice to see that there was a family man underneath John's cold exterior, and nice to get some time to enjoy an actual resolution to a story instead of immediately cutting to credits once you've beaten the final boss.

Which then makes the dramatic "twist" ending much more poignant when John dies after the government betrays their promise. I always like it when main characters die, and the way in which it happens -- opening the barn door, seeing a dozen guys with guns all aimed at you, going into Dead Eye, realizing that everything is futile, but making one last desperate effort to take as many with you as you die -- was impressive. I'd grown such an attachment to John Marston, having played as him for 30 hours, that I was truly saddened by his death and felt a strong absence when the perspective shifted over to his son, Jack, three years later. I wanted revenge for John's death as much as Jack did, and that made the final side-mission "Remember My Family" truly resonate, even in its anticlimactic simplicity.

But at the same time, it's really disappointing that, after three whole years have passed, there's no real change in the game world. After becoming Jack in 1914, I set off to familiar locations looking for familiar characters, wondering what all had happened elsewhere in the meantime, and found no sign whatsoever of anything at all -- I couldn't even find any familiar characters, and there were no new buildings, characters, or missions. The only way to learn about any of the change that's occurred over the past three years is to read the newspaper -- it's a big missed potential not to see any actual change in person, and makes the world feel even more static and lifeless.

I've not played any of Rockstar's other games, so I can't say how RDR compares to the likes of Grand Theft Auto -- all I can do is compare it to other open-world games that I've played. Compared to some other open-world games, RDR has pointless exploration, pointless random encounters, a pointless economy, and non-existent survival mechanics. Very little that you do in this sandbox is of any consequence, and when you consider the game's stale, repetitive combat and its stale, repetitive mission structure, you end up with a game that doesn't impress all that much. The setting and characters are reason enough to play RDR, but the overall game is not nearly as good as people made it out to be.

Narrating The New Stanley Parable, 2013 Edition

What can I say about Galactic Cafe's retail release of The Stanley Parable that I haven't already said in my previous article on its original, free source mod? The problem now, as it was then, is that any kind of description of what The Stanley Parable is, or why it's absolutely worth playing, would spoil its mystique and ruin many of the pleasant surprises in store for gamers unfamiliar with its premise. So the best I can do is attempt to describe its setup as basically as possible, and to describe its allure as vaguely as possible.

The Stanley Parable is a first-person adventure game of sorts, albeit one far from the typical adventure game formula. The Stanley Parable fits in with the crowd of games originally popularized by Dear Esther, wherein you simply walk around a setting and experience an unfolding narrative. Where TSP distinguishes itself from the crowd is the way it embraces freedom of choice and player agency; whereas games like Dear Esther force a rigid storyline upon you, TSP allows you to explore off the beaten path and shape its very course, all in terms of how you choose to react to the narrator.

You play as a man named Stanley, a droning office worker whose job is to sit at a computer terminal pressing buttons on a keyboard as commands stream in through the monitor. Stanley relishes this job and feels contentedly satisfied with life pointlessly typing away at the string of commands. But one day, the commands stopped coming in, and Stanley faces a choice: does he get up to investigate, or does he stay at his post and wait for the problem to solve itself?

This decision does not actually lead to a branching path; inevitably, you'll have to leave your post to see more of what the game has to offer. The choice is a bit of an illusion, but should you choose to linger in the office room, the narration will change to reflect your inaction. That's where TSP's brilliance begins to shine; there's a narrative reaction for nearly every conceivable action or inaction. The narrator has a very specific story that he wants to tell, but since you're in control of your own actions, you have the free will to follow his narrations or to explore off the beaten path, leading to numerous branching paths in the story.

The iconic exemplification of this branching story comes early on, when Stanley enters a new room and the narrator states plainly: "When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left." Do you obediently follow the game's intended path to completion, or do you attempt to explore the unintended paths and push as many boundaries as possible?

I've always been an avid explorer; when a quest arrow pops up pointing me down a specific path, I always go the exact opposite direction and explore every possible option before eventually going down the intended path. Sometimes games reward this kind of effort with rare loot or special power-ups, but just as often I'm met with a pointless dead end or an invisible wall that shatters all suspension of disbelief. Most developers want to tell a very specific story, and slap the player on the wrist whenever they deviate from the path; even the most renowned of RPGs that claim to allow role-playing options still force players down the same linear paths.

As with any video game, your freedom within TSP is still ultimately limited to whatever actions the developers specifically enabled within the game. Even though you're frequently presented with options to deviate from the narrator's intended story, you're still ultimately following one developer's vision of a possible story. What makes TSP fun, in contrast to certain other games, is that it presents the player with numerous meaningful choices that dramatically alter the course of the game, leaving the player with a much greater feeling of choice and independence, while making them feel like their decisions actually matter. It's great fun to test the boundaries -- doing things the narrator didn't anticipate -- and witnessing his reactions. 

The Stanley Parable further plays with video game tropes and conventions in occasional moments where it deliberately breaks the fourth wall. Little moments call attention to the fact that you're just playing a video game, like when the narrator describes Stanley's inner monologue as he realizes that he can't see his feet when he looks down, and that he must therefore be dreaming. You encounter rendering glitches after certain actions, and the narrator whisks you away to play versions of other games when it becomes apparent you have no interest in following his own story. At other points, the narrator calls you (the player) out, insulting you for your stubborn insistence in treating his story like any other video game.

The effect is for TSP to be a incredibly meta experience. It's the kind of game that can really make you think about the elements that go into video game design, as well as making you reflect on your own behaviors and incentives in playing video games. The writing and execution of these ideas are very clever, subtly getting under your skin and exemplifying its ideas through concrete scenarios that make you fall victim to its own critiques. But while it's handling this serious, contemplative subject matter, it also manages to be amusing and entertaining all the way through.

The narrator is the very soul of the game, the sole embodiment of TSP's unique sense of character; without him, you'd just be aimlessly walking around empty hallways. Much of the game's great appeal stems directly from the voice acting provided by Kevan Brighting as the narrator, whose emotional range varies from light-hearted whimsy to annoyed menace to sympathetic compassion, depending on your actions. The pure sound of his voice is often comforting and nostalgic of storybook narrators, and his ironically scripted, "unscripted reactions" to your actions makes him feel like a very real character. The writing behind the narrator had me smiling and chuckling at frequent turns, and Brighting's vocal delivery had me at one point content to sit in a pointless room at long lengths just to keep him happy. 

In the game's core philosophy on defying video game conventions, there is no distinct ending. This is one of the key changes made in going from the free mod to the full retail release -- whereas in the mod, an ending would kick you out to the main menu, thus providing some sense of closure, in the 2013 retail version, each apparent ending dumps you right back at the very beginning of a seemingly new playthrough, making it much harder to distinguish actual "endings" from futile, infinite resets. The only way to "beat" the game is to quit manually via the escape menu, because this isn't a game about "winning."

Going from the free mod to the retail release, I was a little worried that the new version would be basically the same thing but with improved graphics and more spit-polish -- after all, that's basically what Dear Esther did. I found myself pleasantly surprised, however, by the vast amount of totally new content and new twists on familiar sequences. There are a variety of new areas to explore, all new branching paths, and new outcomes to experience. Perhaps what's most interesting is that, with the game's new "no endings" approach, there are recurring themes and variables that occur across playthroughs, which compels you to keep replaying the game looking for new variations. 

Even for the demo for the full retail release offers a whole new world of narrative possibilities. The demo only shows you a few seconds of actual gameplay from the full game; otherwise, it's an entirely separate game meant to hype up the full game while showcasing what goes into the production of demos and ultimately deconstructing the very purpose of demos. The 30-minute free demo is most definitely worth playing, whether you intend to play the full game or not. 

That's about all I can say about The Stanley Parable. There's plenty more that I could say, but doing so would spoil the game, since a large part of the fun comes from discovering things for yourself. There are then other things that I want to say, but I can't quite wrap my brain around some of the deeper meanings to put the game's significance into words. Suffice it to say, The Stanley Parable is one of those rare, clever games that deserves to succeed and is absolutely worth its $14.99 asking price.