The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is a narrative first-person adventure about choices and their consequences. Stanley discovers that his colleagues have disappeared from the office. While he explores the rooms, a narrator comments on his behaviour and tries to dictate his path.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe was released on Apr 27, 2022 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch. The 2022 version is a standalone, extensively expanded reinterpretation of the 2013 game.

The adventure runs natively on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch. On PC there are versions for Windows, macOS and Linux. The different console versions and the PC version tell the same expanded story, while platform features such as achievements and input devices vary.

You move Stanley through office rooms, doors and corridors and decide at many points which path he takes. The interaction consists mainly of exploration and choices. Classic combat, equipment stats or a points system are not the core of the adventure.

The official soundtrack for Ultra Deluxe is sold separately. It adds to the game's music but does not provide any additional story or new game sections. The major content expansions are already part of Ultra Deluxe.

For Windows, Steam lists at least an Intel Core i3 with 2.0 GHz or a comparable AMD processor, 4 GB RAM, a GeForce 450 with 1 GB graphics memory and 5 GB storage. Similar RAM and storage requirements apply to Linux. With its client, Steam now supports Windows 10 or newer.

Your decisions change the course of individual scenes and lead to different stories and endings. Sometimes your behaviour contradicts the narrator's instructions, and sometimes the game questions whether a choice is free at all. Repeated playthroughs open up further paths.

Kevan Brighting voices the English narrator, who constantly comments on Stanley's actions. His instructions are part of the game: you can follow them, ignore them or watch their consequences. The humour often comes from this relationship between voice and character.

Ultra Deluxe includes the well-known content of the original game and expands it with additional scenes, choices, puzzles and secrets. According to Crows Crows Crows, the script of the new content is longer than the entire script of the original. The game world has been technically and visually reworked.

The Stanley Parable from 2013 and Ultra Deluxe are two separate games. If you own the original, you keep it separately. Save games and achievements are not merged. Ultra Deluxe offers a much larger experience and the console versions introduced for the first time.

Ultra Deluxe adds, among other things, settings for colour blindness, notices about potentially distressing content and translated text within the game world. These features are meant to make the narrative paths easier to access without changing the game's basic structure.

On Steam, German on-screen text and subtitles are available. The narrator voice by Kevan Brighting is recorded in English. Further translations include French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Polish.