Me when Mirage hires me to do war crimes: " FREE MONEY! 🤑🤑🤑 "

Me when Crest hires me to do war crimes: " FREE MONEY! 🤑🤑🤑 "

Me when Union hires me to do war crimes: " I'm a mercenary, but I'm still human. Today, I stand before you to express my deep concern about the devastating impacts of war and to advocate for a world that prioritizes peace and diplomacy.

War has long been a source of immense suffering, loss of life, and destruction. It tears apart families, communities, and nations, leaving behind scars that can last for generations. We must remember that there are no winners in war—only profound losses on all sides. The human, social, and economic costs of conflict are staggering. Lives are forever changed, dreams shattered, and futures stolen away. Innocent civilians, including women and children, bear the brunt of the violence, often caught in the crossfire with no means of escape. Let us not forget the toll war takes on our moral compass. It devalues human life, promotes hatred, and perpetuates cycles of revenge and suffering.

As a society, we must reject this path and instead embrace peaceful means of resolving conflicts. Peace is not a sign of weakness; it is a testament to our strength as human beings. It requires courage, compassion, and an unwavering commitment to dialogue, understanding, and negotiation. We must seek common ground, recognizing that our shared humanity far outweighs our differences. We should prioritize dialogue over confrontation, and diplomacy over militarization. By engaging in respectful and inclusive conversations, we can build bridges, foster understanding, and find peaceful solutions to even the most complex of conflicts.

In closing, I implore each and every one of you to embrace the power of peace. Let us be champions of diplomacy, advocates for justice, and voices of reason. Together, we can build a world where conflicts are resolved through dialogue, where peace prevails over war, and where the rights and dignity of every human being are upheld. "

It's easy to look back at The Stanley Parable and laugh at it. It is, after all, a kind of self-important game that said things about video games that were getting pretty tired even in 2013. I loved the Stanley Parable when I first played the mod, loved it a little less when I played the steam release, and ultimately have found it less and less compelling as time goes on, as the times in which the jokes landed got more and more distant and the commentary got more and more trite.

One might reasonably ask why such an aging process has harmed Stanley when it hasn't harmed other games on quite the same level, and my argument for that would be that Stanley, to use a memetic phrase devoid of meaning, insists upon itself. There's little room for interpretation or multifaceted interpretation of it: Stanley Parable is a two-dimensional game, and what I mean by that is that it works on two dimensions: the jokes, and the commentary. There aren't really any other characters or themes or aesthetic twists and flourishes to appreciate: it's a game that is very blunt about what it's saying, and doesn't really have anything to it other than that. Which is fine! Really! But it kinda relies on the things it's saying being really good, and maybe they were, once on the facepunch forums or on ModDb. But now? Not so much.

Which is why the prospect of Ultra Deluxe intrigued me. It represented an opportunity to provide a new experience, to build on what came before, and make a case for Stanley Parable still being relevant, over a decade after the original mod came out. Perhaps I built some unrealistic expectations for it going in, as I did honestly think that a Rebuild of Stanley Parable was the right step to take for this, and I remember feeling similarly deflated by the steam release of Stanley hewing so close to the original mod, but regardless, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe arrives with the enthusiastic impact of a wet fart in an empty room, not so much making a case for the relevance of the work in 2022 as making a supreme demonstration for it's growing irrelevance.

What we have here is an acceptable repackaging of the original game (with some pluses being options to sidestep some of the edgier stuff in the original release, namely the unbearably cringeworthy suicide sequence, and some minuses being the stripping out of jokes in the subtitles and the loss of the language of jokes that Source familiarity provided) alongside some, on the whole, pretty dire new content. Teeth-grindingly ancient observations on collectibles and DLC that would make CTRL+ALT+DEL groan paired with the Bucket. The fucking bucket. All the bucket stuff is absolutely unbearable humor that felt like being trapped in 2012-era reddit with people going on about narwhals and bacon. The superfluity of The Bucket Arc is clearly an argument about the futility of adding extra content in a re-release, but you still went and did it, and it was shit. It's satirical bent never rises above putting a dunce hat on itself and going "look at how dumb we're being". Ultra Deluxe has the same problem as Stanley Parable proper: it cannot help but slam you in the face with it's Point and it's Jokes, and when those land it works, but in Ultra Deluxe they almost never do, so you're just left trudging through a tediously unfunny experience reliving 2015 neoGAF in the most agonizing manner imaginable.

Ultra Deluxe is not without merit: there are truly talented artists and level designers at Crows Crows Crows, and they've crafted some really amazing spaces here. It's something they're really great at: their online multiplayer game/space TheClub.zone (which was shut down to give them time to develop this lol) is proof positive of that. But underneath the enormous weight of The Writing, they're never allowed to live, to breathe beyond the confines of The Writing's vehicle, and unfortunately, The Writing here is crap. It's as simple as that.

I wanted Ultra Deluxe to let me love Stanley Parable again. To prove once and for all that it has stood the test of time, that it does have a worthwhile place in video games and video game culture. But after seeing everything Ultra Deluxe has to offer, all I can do is sigh wearily, and type my review, which is as follows.

(ahem)

"Reddit Game."

Twitter, the video game.

Believe in great causes. Equality justice, in young people, in the power of words. What is great, very gostozzo

Is also homophobic, sexist, and in the end all conflicts are solved by beating the shit out of some anime villain.
Above all, the game just Copies the structure of P3 without making any real sense here, only more restrictive even.

Katsura Hashino has destroyed ATLUS.