YMMV / The Stanley Parable

• Accidental Aesop: It’s important to follow instructions sometimes, if only for self-preservation. Every ending where Stanley dies is directly caused by him disobeying the Narrator, except the one where the Narrator eggs him into jumping from a great height.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: There's quite a few for the Narrator in particular, as he behaves rather differently depending on Stanley's actions. Sometimes (as in the Zending and Confusion Ending), he seems to genuinely be on Stanley's side, while in others (like the Apartment and Countdown endings) he acts as an antagonist, and in still others (like the Freedom or Insane endings), he has no direct interactions with Stanley at all and simply lives up to his namesake as the storyteller. It's rather telling that the narrator is at his most antagonistic when Stanley is either deliberately ignoring his directions (Apartment ending) or trying to hijack the story (Countdown ending), while obeying the narrator generally results in favourable treatment. The one exception seems to be the Confusion ending, where, despite disobeying the narrator multiple times, before the first reset at least, he's very approving and favourable of Stanley. Is he an Omnipotent Jerk who delights in manipulating Stanley? A control-freak who cannot stand dissent? A creator who is trying to show off something he is excited about creating only to (potentially) be thwarted by an uncooperative partner who seems to be causing havoc For the Lulz? Such interpretation is largely left up to the player.
  • Is Stanley as sentient as the Narrator or is he an empty shell that the player inhabits?
  • How aware is the Narrator of the other endings and the looping nature of the game? He does appear to comment on these in endings such as Apartment and Zending, while in others such as Countdown and Insane, he doesn’t seem to recognize that his actions will just be reset when the ending is over.
  • How much control does the Narrator actually have over Stanley or the game itself? He has a decent amount, sure, and can certainly make Stanley's life fairly miserable when he disobeys, but multiple parts of the game hint that the Narrator isn't nearly as in control of his story as he'd like to believe.
    • The Confusion ending shows something dictating the route that both the Narrator and Stanley are taking down to the letter, thwarting multiple resets on the Narrator's end, and manages to forcibly reboot the entire thing as soon as you both quit going along with it. The Museum ending brings up the Curator of the game's development museum, who is introduced via her narration of the Narrator's own actions, and shows herself as fully capable of stopping the game outright when she likes and bringing Stanley into her domain. (However, she does not seem any more capable of truly changing things than the the Narrator does, being forced to plead with the player themself to stop the game where she cannot.) And finally, the Epilogue to the Skip-Button ending fully introduces the Settings Person, who proves capable of modifying endings and gameplay elements that even the Narrator cannot, leaving the Narrator terrified when he discovers evidence of their interference via the repaired achievement machine.
    • The Settings Person's statements to the player in the Epilogue sequence outright states that, to them, the game is condemned to continue to spiral in on itself, forever and ever, with both the Narrator and Stanley subject to the game's content and the player's whims. Not to mention that the Epilogue is a direct follow-up to the Skip-Button ending, where the Narrator's attempts to modify the game to suit player whims ends in him left to decay into nothing when he eventually loses the ability to interfere or change the situation directly.
    • Despite his claims in Ultra Deluxe's Figurine ending, the Narrator doesn't even prove capable of actually retiring Stanley in the aftermath like he says he intends to. You can still play the game as many times as you want, get any ending you want, and even revisit the Figurine ending again, where he says the same thing and nothing changes, via the pictures in the Executive Bathroom. He's just as much a slave to the game as Stanley is, it's just that he either won't, or can't acknowledge it.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The "Inferno Bucket" museum piece in Ultra Deluxe, and the concept of warring for control over a bucket, might seem like pure fiction, but it derives its inspiration from the real-life War of the Bucket.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The Freedom ending can be seen as a proposital example of this. Despite the ending title and Stanley getting free in the story, you can only get this ending by following all of The Narrator's orders. The last line from The Narrator is "Stanley was happy", but considering how unreliable he is, this is probably what he wants Stanley to feel for his story, not how he is actually feeling. Moreover, there's also the fact that, like all the other endings, it takes you right back to beginning of the game.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The only officially named endings are the Freedom Ending, Countdown Ending, Apartment Ending and Zending (during the museum) and the Confusion Ending, Broom Closet Ending and Whiteboard Ending (at some point while playing them). Ultra Deluxe adds the Bottom of the Mind Control Room Ending. The patch notes for Ultra Deluxe gives names/descriptors for certain endings. Additionally, some of the endings only have internal, dev names. This leaves every other ending in the game with a fan-created name, with some of them even receiving multiple names.
  • The second Narrator in the Museum Ending is nicknamed "The Curator".
  • In Ultra Deluxe, the Settings Person is sometimes given the moniker "The Timekeeper".
• Fanon: The Narrator is almost always depicted in one of two fashions in fanart; as a well-dressed older man in glasses, much like his voice actor, Kevan Brighting; or a Humanoid Abomination. These depictions often incorporate The Stanley Parable Adventure Line™ into the design.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Undertale and Deltarune, since both games deal with the concept of choice, pay attention to detail, and, more humorously, involve a Lemony Narrator dealing with the antics of the player character.
  • As a part of the release of Ultra Deluxe, the game's developers released a series of tweets in the style of Deltarune's intro.
  • One of the songs in the soundtrack of Ultra Deluxe is titled "But Nobody Came (not the one from undertale)", which plays during the final part of the Bucket Elevator Ending.
• Good Bad Bugs: The black "monolith" that initially appeared in during the Essence of Divine Art's message (which several people thought was a Shout-Out to the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey) is actually the puppy's door in the Baby Game not disappearing properly. When it was finally patched three years later since it covered some of the text, many players were surprised, thinking the "monolith" was the Divine Art.
• Genius Bonus: One report on a person's desk is "A Brief History of Relations Between Ireland and Austria-Hungary." Austria-Hungary dissolved in 1918 but Ireland didn't become independent until 1922 so the countries never would have had relations with each other.
• He Really Can Act: The entire game well, most of it is carried solely by Kevan Brighting's voice work. He manages to switch from condescending manipulation to warm and comforting depending on the route you take. But where he really manages to shine is during the Zending, where the Narrator hits the Despair Event Horizon as Stanley tries to kill himself over and over again, and the Real Person Ending, where you can hear the desperation in his voice as he begs Stanley to make a choice.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A game about keeping a baby from killing themselves? Surely that could never be made for real.
  • An adventure game with online elements showing you how other players have played the game and what choices they made sounds ridiculous, but about a year later Telltale Games starting doing that with some of its episodic adventure games, like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us.
  • The Stanley Parable Adventure Line™ is a bright, garish yellow painted line that is an attempt to handhold and guide the player onto the right track. Several years later, people would debate the presence of yellow paint to guide the player in games such as the Resident Evil 4 and Final Fantasy VII remakes.
• Jerkass Woobie: The Narrator, depending on which ending you get. The Confusion ending implies that he's not really in control at all and is just as controlled and trapped as Stanley.
  • Also, though whether it's canon or not is unclear (as it is from another game,) in one of the Narrator's dialogues in Dungeons 3, while ranting about not being able to work with professionals for once, he mutters to himself, "Take a deep breath, remember what they taught you. You don't want any more of those electric shocks."
• Memetic Mutation:
  • EIGHT! ^ExplanationThe demo of the 2013 HD remake features a button in place of the actual The Stanley Parable demo that has a red number eight painted on it and pressing it causes a voice to shout out "EIGHT!" while the number lights up on several tiny monitors behind it. The Narrator pleads with the player that this is not the actual game and demands him to leave the room, becoming increasingly desperate if the player remains and repeatedly presses the button.
  • OH, DID U GET THE BROOM CLOSET ENDING? THEB ROOM CLOSET ENDING WAS MY FAVRITE!1 XD ^ExplanationIf you spend enough time loitering in the broom closet, the Narrator asks if you're holding out for another ending, and says there isn't one. He then snarks that you're probably stupid enough to think waiting in the closet is the ending, and you'll go on the internet afterwards and say "OH, DID U GET THE BROOM CLOSET ENDING? THEB ROOM CLOSET ENDING WAS MY FAVRITE!1 XD". Naturally, people took to saying just that once they got the "ending". He doesn't say "XD" out loud, or any of the intentional misspellings though, those just appear in the subtitles.
    • I find this concerning. ^ExplanationHow the Narrator hopes other people will respond to this. Which, most of the time, they do to continue the joke.
  • Stanley, this fern will be very important later in the story. Make sure you study it closely, and remember it carefully. You won't want to miss anything. ^ExplanationContrary to what the Narrator says, the fern isn't important at all, but people treat it as more important than it actually is, just for fun.
  • Before he had even began to realize it, Stanley started to narrate in the style of the game. ^ExplanationTalking just like the Narrator is a common joke among fans.
  • The Stanley Parable Reassurance Bucket. ^Explanation A bucket that can be found in Ultra Deluxe that often derails the story further by holding it.
• Once Original, Now Common: The Stanley Parable was designed to be a commentary of how choice was implemented in video games up to 2011, namely that they were still essentially railroading the player despite promising freedom. While gaming had not evolved enough for this message to be irrelevant for the 2013 HD Remix, the same could not be said for the Ultra Deluxe version in 2022. By this time, it was commonplace for developers to acknowledge players' awareness of railroading, and as a result games promising freedom tend to be Wide Open Sandboxes to better live up to the hype, with some games taking a more retrospective view of choice, such as Undertale and Disco Elysium.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • While the introductory dialogue by the Narrator generally stays the same, with him commenting on the disappearance of Stanley's coworkers, there is a random chance that a different dialogue will play, catching many players off guard. One particularly notable line preys on the Nothing Is Scarier factor of the game:
    Narrator: Someone was following Stanley. He was sure of it. If he checked over his shoulder now, he would shortly catch them. It was only a matter of time.
  • By the same vein as the above, when wandering in the main office area, there is a small chance that the player can spot another person walking by, in a game with no other characters, when passing room 425. Because the model is actually the same one as Stanley's, According to a Reddit AMA, this is another version of Stanley who is taking a different path in the game and existing concurrently with the playable one.
  • While most loops will have the exact same office layout, some will randomly replace parts of it with noticably different ones, only to revert to the normal version on the next loop.
  • The Narrator gets this himself when you get the Test Achievement post-Epilogue. He doesn't know how the Achievement Machine got fixed, and becomes concerned that someone else is watching him.
• Play-Along Meme: You'll be hard pressed to find a guide for the game that doesn't include the Whiteboard Ending and the Broom Closet Ending even though neither is actually an ending, since both allow the player to move on with the story once they are done. This is because both are jokingly referred to as endings by the game: the former features a whiteboard with the words "Welcome to the WHITEBOARD ENDING!" in it, and the latter has the narrator question if you are staying inside the broom closet for so long because you're expecting to get an ending out of it, and how you'll tell your friends that "the broom closet ending was [your] favorite".
• Pop Culture Holiday: April 27 (4/27, referencing Stanley's employee number being 427) is known as Stanley Day by the game's fans. Notably, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe released on April 27, 2022.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: "Stanarrator" for Stanley/Narrator.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • To Stranger Than Fiction, another work of media about a generic office worker that ends up at odds against an omniscient narrator, with themes of choice and fate.
  • Yahtzee Croshaw also favorably compared the game in one of his Extra Punctuation columns to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, describing both works as "a sort of exploration of characters becoming aware of being trapped inside a story but unable to do anything to escape it."
• That One Achievement:
  • The HD version goes to town on parodying this. The top three "impossible" achievements require you to spend an entire Tuesday playing the game, to not play the game for five years, and the final one is completely impossible to get. The first two can be acquired by adjusting your computer's date and time settings, the third seems to be handed out at random, if YouTube evidence is to be believed^note ...or you can use this guide to cheat your way to it.
  • Taken further in The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. The "don't play the game" has been extended to ten years as a "Super" achievement, and another requires the player to jump through several hoops and engage in problem-solving to unlock, while the Narrator regards it as "broken."
• That One Sidequest: The "Art" ending basically requires a script to get. You have to "play" the Baby Game for four hours. That is four literal hours of pressing a button over and over again to stop a baby from walking into a fire. And then to make matters worse, two hours into it, he adds a second button a bit away that stops a puppy from being lowered into a bucket of piranhas. So for the rest of the two hours, you have to run back and forth pressing both buttons with very little time to spare. Really, it isn't feasible unless you have a program to do it for you.

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