The Stanley Parable tells the story of a soporific office worker named Stanley.
Image courtesy Davey Wreden

Every videogame presents its players with a series of choices. While these choices might range from insignificant (where to jump next) to world-changing (whether to kill the king), they are almost always meaningful to the gamer’s experience in some way.

The Stanley Parable, a downloadable indie game made with developer Valve’s free Source engine, does present you with choices. However, they don’t mean anything.

This is precisely the point.

“The design document for [The Stanley Parable] was, ‘Mess with the player’s head in every way possible,’” says creator Davey Wreden, “throwing them off-guard, or pretending there’s an answer and then kinda whisking it away from in front of them.”

Though Source games are a dime a dozen, very few have received as much acclaim as The Stanley Parable. Fans and critics have taken to this Source mod, which Wreden says has been downloaded more than 90,000 times since its release two weeks ago.

In the game, you inhabit the body of Stanley, a man who, despite working a monotonous office job, is completely content with his life. One day, everybody in Stanley’s office disappears. Guided by a disembodied narrator — voiced impeccably by British actor Kevan Brighting — Stanley ventures off to find out why nobody is there.

It’s impossible to say much more without ruining the game’s brilliantly disjointed story, which takes around an hour to experience in its entirety. There are multiple choices, paths and endings, all of which will leave you with many questions and absolutely no answers. But The Stanley Parable will leave you thinking, and that’s what Wreden is aiming for.

‘The whole point of the game is that there is no answer.’

“The whole point of the game is that there is no answer,” Wreden said in a phone interview with Wired.com. “The entirety of the game is realizing what the question is in the first place.”

The Stanley Parable breaks the fourth wall constantly, acknowledging that it is a videogame, limited by the medium’s constraints. It also presents hypothetical questions about the nature of choice, posits a debate about reality and contradicts its own rules constantly.

Wreden says the most valuable part of the game is when you turn it off and discuss the experience with somebody else. He hopes to leave players talking about the nature of videogames — and thinking about ways to take interactive storytelling to the next level.

“You have to critique the things that you love for them to be better,” says Wreden, a USC film school graduate. “I wanted this to be kind of a slap to the face [to videogame developers], to say, ‘Hey, take a look at what you’ve been doing so far.’ I wanted to ask the question ‘Why are we doing this?’”

The 22-year-old Wreden, who never designed a game before, says he made The Stanley Parable more out of curiosity than anything else. In the past few weeks, he’s been contacted by many developers — both hobbyist and professional — all of whom are interested in working with him on future projects.

But first, Wreden is planning to completely remake The Stanley Parable and re-release it as a pay-what-you-want game. After that? He has no idea — he’s just happy that he was able to make at least one splash in the industry.

“Hopefully people play it and say, ‘Holy hell, what did I just experience?’”