Nightmare Fuel / The Stanley Parable

"The end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end..."

—The Narrator's Madness Mantra after enough time skips in the Sequel ending

The reader felt a sudden chill creeping up their spine as they were reminded that beneath its comedic exterior, The Stanley Parable is a tale of Existential Horror, rife with both Nightmare Fuel and Paranoia Fuel with its surprisingly excellent use of Nothing Is Scarier and Controllable Helplessness.

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• The Narrator's progressively more manipulative and antagonistic behavior can get this way.
  • Sorry, but you're in my story now.
• The Apartment ending is particularly disturbing because the game ceases commenting on game conventions and begins commenting on free will as it pertains to the real life of the player. Stanley returns home from work to find that his wife is a mannequin and in fact doesn't exist as a person (much to the Narrator's mirth, as he suddenly enters full sadism mode). Coercing Stanley into entering the apartment, the Narrator smugly states that Stanley sits behind his screen all day wishing he was on fantastic adventures that "will never happen". The game forces you to press buttons with instructions such as "Press O to go out with the boys", "Press V to tell your wife you love her" and "Press H to go to sleep.", implying everything the player does in their real life is completely meaningless and predictable. The level also confines you to a TINY room, barely able to move as it morphs back to Stanley's office. This pleasant experience concludes with the game simply telling you "PLEASE DIE" as the Narrator begins to loop. It's one heck of a Player Punch and comes across as genuinely fatalistic and unnerving.
  • The original "Pawn" ending is another creepy variant, where the Narrator restarts the story and changes it so that the monitor commanding Stanley never shuts off to give him an opportunity for escape. Thus, he is left a mindless slave as it dictates his every action, while the Narrator creepily describes how it's all hopeless and how Stanley will never escape, and then the monitor suddenly displays "Please die" and everything goes black...
• If you wait to or don't enter the code in the boss's office, the Narrator gets impatient. What differentiates this from his other, humorous tirades is the fact that a while in, his subtitles turn red. This is one of the few times in the game this happens, and it's probably the first one you'll come across, so it really takes you off guard.
  One. Nine. Five. Seven.
  Two. Eight. Four. Five.
• The "Museum" ending where you end up trapped in a cage and slowly move towards a crusher, while the second narrator cuts in and begs you to take control away from the game by exiting it, her voice growing increasingly desperate, and then is suddenly cut off by the crusher smashing into you.
  Female Narrator: But listen to me. You can still save these two. You can stop the program before they both fail. Push escape, and press quit. There's no other way to beat this game. As long as you move forward, you'll be walking someone else's path. Stop now, and it'll be your only true choice. Whatever you do, choose it! Don't let time choose for you! Don't let time-!SMASH
  • In console versions of Ultra Deluxe, she outright tells you to turn off your console, even acknowledging which console you are playing on.
    Female Narrator: Turn off your Xbox/Playstation/Nintendo Switch. There's no other way to beat this game.
• The gradual realization that the Countdown ending is unwinnable, when you first play it.
  • The Narrator takes a sudden turn for the sadistic in that ending, with a long, taunting monologue:
    Narrator: Oh, dear me, what's the matter, Stanley? Is it that you have no idea where you're going or what you're supposed to be doing right now? Or did you just assume when you saw that timer that something in this room was capable of turning it off? I mean, look at you, running from button to button, screen to screen, clicking on every little thing in this room! These numbered buttons! No! These colored ones! Or maybe this big, red button! Or this door! Everything! Anything! Something here will save me! Why would you think that, Stanley? That this video game can be beaten, won, solved? Do you have any idea what your purpose in this place is? Hahaha, heh, Stanley... you're in for quite a disappointment. But here's a spoiler for you: that timer isn't a catalyst to keep the action moving along. It's just seconds ticking away to your death. You're only still playing instead of watching a cutscene because I want to watch you for every moment that you're powerless, to see you made humble. This is not a challenge. It's a tragedy. You wanted to control this world. That's fine. But I'm going to destroy it first, so you can't.
  • Additional playthroughs of that ending are no better, with the Narrator mocking your vain attempts in trying it again.
    Narrator: ...But you really believe there's an answer? How many times will you replay this bit, looking desperately for a solution? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? I look forward to finding out, and to watching the bomb go off each time you fail. Just you and me and the retching explosion of fire and metal over and over and over again for all of eternity.
    And Stanley died again.
    And Stanley died again.
    And Stanley died again.
  • It gets worse. When 30 seconds are remaining, just to taunt you, The Narrator adds more time, resetting the clock to about 1:45. This isn't to give you more time to spare yourself, as stated above. But more time for the aforementioned speech.
  • The cherry on top of this is when the last 30 seconds remain (after the Narrator adds time). You hear the first explosions rocking the facility, that persist until the timer hits zero. To reiterate: the countdown isn't when the nuclear detonators go boom, but when said booms reach your area.
  • If you think the Narrator's subtitles turning red in the boss' office is jarring, this ending from the original mod takes it up to eleven.
    Narrator: I'll be here to watch every second of your inevitable life, from the time we fade in, until the moment I say
    'Happily ever af-' (The timer runs out, cue explosion)
  • The most horrifying part is, once the Narrator drops the act and reveals that you’re doomed, every monitor that was previously presenting a potential way out stops playing along, too, and they all display "Goodbye, Employee 427". They were programmed to play along with the cruel joke, too.
• The "Sneak Peek" trailer, which starts out looking like a Let's Play until the Let's Player (Chilled Chaos) gets stuck in a dead end, at which point he seems to start losing his mind before the screen cuts to black and the Narrator starts delivering a chilling monologue. The end of his speech is just the cherry on top of it all.
  Narrator: Soon, you will be the one to walk. The controls will be in your hands. Soon, we will find out if your friends turn and laugh at you as they did with him. [Laughs] Oh, I think I'm going to enjoy this. When you find out how alone you truly are, I will be laughing more than anyone. Very soon, now. The end is nearly here. Let's play, everyone. Let's. All. Play.
• In the HD Remake, when unplugging the telephone, the room you were in starts glitching up and deteriorating from "Narrative Contradiction" after the Narrator forces you to watch a video about choices. When he redirects you back to the room with the two doors and instructs you to go left like normal, going through the right door leads you into a glitched dead end. After going back left, the meeting room has glitched. After going back to the room with two doors, the glitching and deteriorating further spreads until the Narrator shuts the game down and everything goes black, and then the room reappears again except dark and completely destroyed.
• Any part in either the original mod or the HD Remake that doesn't have narration.
• During the Confusion ending, the Narrator attempts to fix the breaking of the story by the use of The Stanley Parable Adventure Line™, which is supposed to lead you down the proper path, but the Line™ Itself™ starts swerving in unexpected directions. The finale to this ending is a room with a schedule board with the description of all five false restarts so far and three additional restarts that are supposed to occur afterward, beginning with the Narrator forgetting about the previous restarts and ending with the Narrator's disappearance as well as Stanley's death. The Narrator objects to his memory being erased and seems to successfully abort the plotline altogether, but the game is violently restarted against his will. This is, however, a completely fresh start, but if you choose to go through the door on the right at your first choice and look through some windows in the hallway, you'll see the Adventure Line™ rambling Its™ way around the interior of the room.
  • There are at least a couple of other places where it's possible to spot the Line™ immediately after the reset from the Confusion Ending. One is through one of the windows of an unnumbered office to your right just before the two doors (assuming you didn't get the short corridor or blue office after the reset). (In Ultra Deluxe, you can still spot this through the windows, but if you then enter the room via the New Content door, the Line™ is no longer there, and if you go back to the window, the Line™ has vanished from that view as well). The other is in the cargo bay, between two doors on the docking bay level below you (though the appearance of this instance of the Line™ seems to be random).
  • Not to mention the JARRINGLY loud noise that cuts into the Narrator's speech at the end, followed by a hard cut to black.
• The HD Remix's Crazy/Mariella ending. The new music and the Narrator's much more desperate, emotive commentary combine to form an ending far more intense than the original version.
  Narrator: Stanley began screaming.
• Sometimes in the HD Remix, on rare occasions, you can see another person walking through the hallway through a window. Using cheats, the Steam community have discovered that he uses the same model as Stanley; therefore, this is happening over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
• The concept of the game as a whole. Essentially, the message of the game is that not only do you have no control over anything that happens in your life, neither does the one controlling you in the first place. If you don't hold the power, and the puppeteer pulling your strings doesn't hold the power, who does?
  • The octane rating of the Nightmare Fuel doubles when you realize the questions of choice and destiny can, and are really not-so-subtly meant to be, applied to Real Life in general. The very nature of this game most likely will cause you to have your very own existential crisis. What fun!
• The Games Ending. The Narrator, so fed up with Stanley, essentially abandons him in an unfinished netherspace of half-finished environments and utter darkness. Stanley plunges down and lands in the setting of the original mod- decimated, and devoid of light... and he's left alone there, presumably forever. In Ultra Deluxe, its changed to Stanley going somewhere the Narrator can't follow him into, but he seems to regard it in the same way- plus, he’ll still abandon him if you choose to play along.
  Narrator: I wonder what he found.
• The Escape Pod ending. Nothing Is Scarier than Stanley to walk alone, without the Narrator to guide him, with no sound. And when you reached the Escape Pod, all of a sudden the screen turns to black before reseting.
  • When the Steam community dissected the inner workings of the ending, they found fine print in the ending's room and console errors that indicate two things: One, the Narrator needs to be present for the pod to launch (he isn't, hence the silence.) Two, the bugs that trigger the console errors are intentional and more or less boil down to the game being unable to handle the Narrator being separated from Stanley. Many speculate that the Escape Pod ending could have been a Golden Ending, had the Narrator been with Stanley.
• The first section of the game - from Stanley's office to the two doors - is the most played section of the game, played over and over again. Thus, to avoid you getting too comfortable in this constant, the game likes to change it every now and again. This can be quite unsettling at times. To give but a few examples of possible changes:
  • The floor is covered in papers.
  • The ambient music is replaced with the sound of rain.
  • There is no ambient music at all.
  • The copier makes copying sounds.
  • All of the monitors display a fullscreen version of the loading screen's "THE END IS NEVER THE END IS NEVER THE END IS NEVER..."
  • Occasionally, the narrator will give different voiced lines when Stanley leaves his office, ranging from Stanley's inner monologues and thoughts to the narrator telling Stanley that he is being followed by someone. Considering that this only occurs after quite a bit of gameplay where the player's only artificially human contact is a single voice, this can be quite paranoia inducing.
  • The route changes - either Stanley's office opens into a blue room and corridor, or there is an extra corridor or two just before where you would normally enter the two-door room, or it will skip the majority of the office and go straight into the two-door room from your office. Additionally, usually the first turn you make through the office leads to a hallway going to the right, but sometimes that hallway instead points left, which is just enough to make you wonder if something actually did change, or if you just imagined it.
  • One of the office telephones starts ringing. Finding and answering the phone will play a semi-randomly selected one-sided conversation, which sometimes has an effect on subsequent playthroughs.
    • One of said messages will ask you to confirm a shipment for boxes. Should you confirm it, the office will be littered with boxes on the next playthrough.
• The original "Real Person" ending happens when Stanley unplugs the ringing phone. The Narrator gets to the conclusion that if Stanley did such a non-intuitive choice there must be a real person (you, the player) controlling him and then, after concluding that you're the one who's been ruining his story, he eventually separates Stanley from your control entirely. The last scene is a view from the ceiling in the room where Stanley has the choice to pick a door, with the Narrator desperately begging him to go the left door, realizing that he can't tell his story because, without the player, Stanley can't do anything. Quite unsettling. This is also the true ending of the game. As, without a player, a game isn't a game. Therefore, with the player gone, the game is over and the narrator is trapped forever with unresponsive Stanley in a And I Must Scream scenario.
• A bit of narration that appears in the dark echoey room of the Museum implies the Confusion Ending would originally have closed with the narrator realizing he's only a disembodied voice incapable of deviating from the game's script, and frantically pleading Stanley to tell him where (and who, and what) he is, only for his words to start cutting off, leaving him incapable of speaking more than disjointed syllables before the last reset.

Ultra Deluxe edition

• At the end of the New Content section, the "Skip Button" ending is when the Narrator creates a Skip Button in a concrete room in response to a bad Steam review. It starts off amusing, with the Narrator rambling about a bad review, and even joking about how verbose he can be, but soon, the door out of the Skip Button room disappears, and the Narrator explains that, between each button press, the skip lasts for longer and longer intervals. And it's clear these moments of time take their toll on the psyche of the Narrator, culminating to the point where he's just speaking to himself, "the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never--" and you have no choice but to skip again. Next time Stanley comes to, there's just silence and the room breaking down around him...
  • On the 13th skip, a hole appears in the room's ceiling, then on the 14th skip, light begins to stream in through it, and soon overgrowth on the 15th skip with birds chirping in the distance through the hole. However, on the 16th skip, it's all gone without a trace, except that the overgrowth has somehow been reduced to black ash and the bird chirping replaced by distant, otherworldly howling coming from the now pitch-black outside. Skipping a 17th time the ominous howling is replaced by eerie screeching. On the final skip, the entire room is tilted, buried in the middle of a flat, endless desert. While the game will reset on its own once you wander far enough, the Narrator is not present for any of this, seemingly long gone, and the sequence as a whole is eerily similar to the last part of the Confusion ending's schedule.
  • And imagine how scary this is for Stanley. He was just helping out the Narrator with a new game feature and suddenly, pieces of time are missing, and the Narrator is just...gone. And he has no choice but to watch the world crumbling, only able to push buttons to distract from it all...
  • That otherworldly howling? Someone sped it up, and it sounds like the Narrator calling out for Stanley's name. Forever.
  • During the skips, the Narrator goes from passive-aggressively explaining exactly what Stanley is putting him through, before being silent on the next skip. The skip after that, you enter partway through the Narrator angrily and loudly ranting to himself about the bad review that got him into this mess, sticking around and listening has him change the rant into an existential tirade about the transient nature of entertainment and it's frequent psychological usage as a means of escapism from crushing despair, both emotional and mental, before insisting that he's not mad, humans are mad because they require entertainment and amusement to distract themselves from the darker natures of life, which is why they expected the game to be funny, but they didn't understand the game was never meant to be funny-...and he repeats the rant endlessly into itself.
  • The Narrator repeatedly admits he has no idea why the skips are getting longer and longer.
    • Just how much time does pass with each push? How many years have passed once the Skip button finally breaks? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Billions?!
    • Earlier in the Memory Zone path, the Narrator says he doesn't remember the area you find the bad reviews in at all.
• In the "Stanley Parable 2" section, in the room with the infinity hole, after you fall down the hole and reach the bottom, you are teleported to the surface, this time with the hole shortened to be around 2 ft deep. The Narrator will persuade Stanley to leave the room, but Stanley can still fall down it, and since Stanley can't get out (the teleport function that he previously used is now broken), the Narrator will leave him. Pretty simple at first, until the hole begins sinking, and things get weird as button prompts begin warping reality around yourself.
  [F] change your perception
  [G] change your perspective
  [H] change your reality
  [J] change your self
  • Alternatively, when the button prompts appear, you can not push anything and subject yourself to an endless ASMR stream as the hole slowly descends forever.
• For the most part, the Stanley Parable Reassurance Bucket is a comedic break, serving as Nightmare Retardant for most of the endings due to how far the Narrator is willing to take it seriously as well as generally making most of the endings goofier in some capacity. Other times, though? Other times it feels like a damn SCP.
  • The Vent Ending, in and of itself, is relatively harmless, meant to make fun of the idea of All Just a Dream and similar story concepts, but suddenly takes a darker turn when the bucket is added into the mix. For starters, unlike the regular version of the ending, Stanley can't move and the camera is forced to focus on the desk, slowly zooming in as the recording goes on. It still doesn't seem too bad at first, seeming like the other bucket endings as the man in the recording rambles about making a profit off of the bucket, before stating that he knows someone is after him already for the idea. And he's right. But it's not some police officer or government agent, no no no, it's an Eldritch Abomination who the man namedrops before it unceremoniously ends his life and the recording. And the worst part? The player is most likely only going to encounter the vent ending after unlocking the bucket and collectibles, thanks to one of the latter requiring the player to go down to the plank walkway where the entrance to the ending is. And if they feel like messing around with the bucket? There's a good chance that this will be the version of the Vent Ending they encounter first.
  • If you take it to the Out of Map Ending, it will begin telling Stanley its history, and about how it "desecrated the land and lives of untold numbers of innocent humans". While it very clearly expresses regret for these actions, the revelation seems to make Stanley go insane, until the bucket begins to "reveal its true form". After a cut to black and the sound of several slashes, the player is greeted with the lovely shot of the stabbed bucket profusely bleeding on the floor.
    • Even worse? According to the bucket, the reason for his current form is that he was cursed by the evil wizard Gambhorra'ta. Said wizard is the same one who attacks the man in the aforementioned vent ending.
  • In the Bucket version of the Phone ending, the Bucket is the one doing the influencing, while the Narrator is actively concerned for Stanley and tries to reason with him. Eventually even the Narrator becomes enthralled by the Bucket, and starts demanding that Stanley give him the bucket while the Bucket is waiting for Stanley on his bed, with some heavy implications of them being in some weird sexual relationship.
  • The Bottom of the Mind Control Facility Ending is played much more seriously and has a bit more lore to it. Stanley survives as the bucket cushions his fall, and decides to make a home in the room. He and the bucket seem to have a happy time down there, but when Stanley realizes he hadn't seen the whole place properly, he loses his mind, rambling about how he should've stayed on the path, all while the bucket can only watch in worry.
• If you play through all the plot-essential endings and get to the Epilogue, the Settings Person fixes the broken achievement machine. Play the game again, and when you get to the machine it gives you the achievement as promised. The Narrator (realizing that there's someone else messing with his game) practically has a panic attack and is audibly struggling not to freak out in front of Stanley. It's especially jarring because The Narrator never acts like this in other endings. Even in the few endings where he's caught off guard he usually sounds angry (like in the Confusion ending) or sad (like in the Zending): this is the first time he sounds afraid.
• The Anniversary Update to the game adds new versions of the Coward and Heaven endings for if the door to Stanley's office remains open, therefore allowing him to bring the bucket there with him. However, the Bucket variation of the Heaven ending isn't quite as tranquil as the original was, instead depicting Stanley and the bucket in some kind of ruined landscape, surrounded by giant pedestals and floating buckets, all with Ominous Latin Chanting of "bucket" in the background. Though you can move around, it's not quite as obvious at first glance, considering the area stretches on for what feels like infinity.

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