I recently played a new mod for Half-Life 2, and once I was finished I knew I had to tell everyone about it. However, telling people about something like The Stanley Parable is to ruin the experience entirely.
To borrow from the words of it’s creator, The Stanley Parable is an experimental and narrative-driven exploration of choice, freedom, storytelling and reality, all examined through the lens of what it means to play a video game. Knowing any more about the game than that would put a severe and irreversible damper on you enjoyment of it; the less you know about it before you play it, the better.
Having said that, I wholeheartedly encourage you to play The Stanley Parable if you have any interest in video games whatsoever. To play, only the Source SDK Base 2007 is required, so you could play the mod without having Half-Life 2 installed. If unzipping a folder isn’t something your comfortable with you can install it using Desura, a community driven digital distribution service for games and mods, which I’ve played around with for a bit and think is pretty cool.
I could talk profusely about The Stanley Parable and the many interesting questions it raises about this medium we love so dearly, but I fear I may have already said too much.
hi!!!