Narrative
The Stanley Parable, Ultra Deluxe story is incredibly unique and unpredictable. The game starts with a brief video explaining that the character the user will be playing is a man named Stanley who works in a button-pushing factory. However, he notices he is the only one in the office. The game starts and the user begins to explore. The Narrator gives hints as to where to go and what doors to take. Soon, Stanley gets to a room labeled ‘Mind Control Facility' and alarms go off. The game restarts.
After a couple of attempts, the player will often decide to ignore the Narrator, but this is predicted. The Narrator turns sarcastic and comedically pleads with Stanley to listen to him. He has the player second-guessing their own choices, sometimes taking the Narrator’s advice other times going off entirely on their own. The layout of the office changes with every restart and the doors close behind Stanley as soon as he goes through them.
The Stanley Parable, Ultra Deluxe is the sequel to The Stanley Parable and it is set and presented in the same way as the original, but the producers were anything but subtle when it came to displaying their new content, with a door labeled ‘New Content.’ There is a whole section that seems to have been engineered purely for the purpose to poke fun at the reviews of the original game and creating a premier-styled layout to show off random new additions to this version of the game.
The deeper the player goes into the game, the less office-like the landscape becomes. A 'Memory Zone' is added and the Narrator brings Stanley to two entirely different games; Firewatch and Sportsball. There are nineteen possible endings to this game and none of them are obvious nor are they predictable, often with the player being shocked that they completed the game
The narrative structure of The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe is branching, which can be understood as when the user has to make choices for the story to unfold and the narrative will change depending on that decision (Maurin).