The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe gets April 27 launch date

In brief: A remastered version of The Stanley Parable is set to arrive next month on most major platforms. The original was conceived by Davey Wreden and came to life as a Half-Life 2 mod in mid-2011. It is a first-person adventure game in which you play as Stanley, an office employee who discovers that his co-workers have all disappeared.

What happened? That’s for you to try and find out.

You will play as Stanley, and you will not play as Stanley. You will make a choice, and you will have your choices taken from you. The game will end, the game will never end. Contradiction follows contradiction, the rules of how games should work are broken, then broken again. You are not here to win. The Stanley Parable is a game that plays you.

A remake followed in 2013, rolling even more endings and content into what became a standalone game. An Ultra Deluxe version was announced in 2018 and scheduled to launch the following year on a variety of platforms but ultimately, more development time was needed (some say, demanded). The pandemic hit shortly after, casting even more uncertainty over the project.

“Early in development, the plan was just to bring The Stanley Parable to consoles with a few small tweaks, but as time went on we kept getting more and more excited about what else we could do with the game, developer and publisher Crows Crows Crows said in a prepared statement.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe will launch on April 27, 2022 (that’s 4/27, or room 427) on Xbox One, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and on the PC via Steam. Given all of the new content and added endings, it should have decent replay value, especially if you are brand new to the title.