The Stanley Parable is a truly engaging game that pulls the player in. To me, the narration was definitely the best part of the game – just sitting in the broom closet until the narrator lost his cool was totally worth it. The multitude of endings are all so different and so bizarre, it’s hard to imagine what lead the creators to think of them. One set of endings that really stuck with me involved the mind control room. In this room, a huge set of displays was watching each room, making sure each worker was working as they should.
This definitely seems like a commentary on today’s world, in which we are slaves to our devices. We are so consumed by our phones and computers today that we almost being “mind controlled” by them. While technology has immeasurably improved our lives, it has also taken away from some aspects of culture and daily life that were common before. This story-line, while extreme, tells us that the endless button-pushing of the office workers represents the “technological prison” some may say that we live in.
Another ending worth looking at is the ending where you just jump off of the cargo lift and die. When you do this, the narrator comments on you trying to break free of his control and take back power. In The Stanley Parable, it seems that this is really the only way. The narrator has some sort of story to make it seem that you are following some path he created. This is just a thought, that the only way to take control of the game is to have a mundane (relatively) ending of just walking off the platform and restarting. At one point, however, the narrator changes the game and adds a railing to the platform, getting rid of that option entirely.
The Stanley Parable’s many different endings make the it the masterpiece that it is (and my favorite game we’ve played so far!), giving the player the opportunity to explore the elaborate world Stanley works in. For the creator, this diversity of endings gives them a chance to comment on relevant topics and make a statement, or just create something beyond the absurd!
Oh yeah, I loved the broomcloset ending! The broomcloset ending was my favorite!
Joking aside, considering the game's broad diversity of narrated "endings," I think it would also be interesting to draw attention to an "endings" that are not narrated.
A somewhat well known "non-narrated ending" that is not too difficult to achieve can be found in the room covered in monitors when proceeding through the narrator's canonical path. If the player manages to climb atop one of the desks on the first platform in this room, the player can walk over the railing and fall off the edge of this platform. Rather than this resulting in Stanley's death, Stanley will simply fall until he reaches the dark bottom of…