The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Critic Reviews

The 2022 release adds an Ultra Deluxe desert to the menu, elevating the night out from a lovely dinner to an indulgent feast. It’s a dining experience worth returning to for fans who already count The Stanley Parable among their favourite meals, balanced with providing the perfect place for new players to take a chance on something different. Regardless of which door you enter, the philosophical taste is likely to linger long after you’re finished.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe might joke about overly aggrandizing reviews, but it’s one of the few games that’s actually deserving of one. For all its smugness, I’d love to sit here and tell you that The Stanley Parable is pretentious and full of shit, but it earns every right to its pretension. And I for one and so glad I’m here to see it. There’s a reason it’s considered one of the best games of all time.

Ultra Deluxe is easily going to be one of the finest gaming experiences of the year, despite its short length relative to most. This is a game that gets in, says exactly what its creators wanted to say, and then gets out…maybe. The most ridiculous elements of the original are still perfectly preserved here, and then amplified in the new content, letting the player experience exactly what they want to. I wouldn’t change a single thing about it.

Thinking of The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe as just a remaster or a sequel to the original would be doing it an immense disservice. Yes, it's The Stanley Parable with more content and on new platforms. But it's also much more than that: it's a criticism of the industry's over-reliance on DLCs and sequel, it's a tale that makes us reflect on what videogames are and should be, and it's a powerful window on Davey Wreden's evolution since the original. Unmissable.

The Stanley Parable is still an excellent, provocative and unique experience that any fan of narrative adventures and out-of-the-box game design must play. With great new content that adapts to modern gaming culture and industry, it is certainly a cult classic expanded and built upon in the greatest manner possible.

The Stanley Parable’s base game truly holds up almost a decade later, both in its hilarious narrated writing and the clever satire that houses it. Ultra Deluxe may seem like little more than a decent lighting improvement and a simple console port on the surface, but the new content that’s been added alongside those things is on the scale of a whole new game. Those new encounters are consistently impressive and always entertaining, even if the feeling that we’ve seen some of these tricks before means they never quite reached the heights of my first surprising playthrough back in 2013. But if you’ve never played The Stanley Parable at all, Ultra Deluxe is a definitive version that provides another extremely convincing reason to do so.

The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe is an adventure that continues to surprise after years. It is a journey into the human mind that manages to entertain, make people laugh and think at the same time.

It seemed impossible to improve, but they have managed to make even better a fantastic game like no other. Do not miss it.

While it may not be as truly groundbreaking as the original, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe is a must-play for fans of the original – and if you’ve never experienced the game, it’s the perfect place to learn what made the original so brilliant while finding a number of new twists.

Always ingenious, funny and captivating, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is definitely worth lingering over again in 2013's cult experience. Today, it still expands with a level-design that is still clever and surprising. And what a pleasure to rediscover the implacable humor of the narrator.

The Stanley Parable once again charmed me with its narrative and its constant toying with the player. There’s not much game in it but despite that (or maybe because of that) it says a lot about other games and gamers. It’s a brilliant, one-of-a-kind title, now available in a richer, longer version.

A delightful update that fills the original game with even more humorous and thoughtful rabbit holes to get lost in.

Would you like an inexpensive getaway from the video game matrix for a few hours? Here's your ticket.

Most importantly, the old jokes are still funny.

You'll laugh your eyes out, guaranteed. Ultra Deluxe has new endings, new content but keeps the same sense of humour and everything that made original game a hit.

TSP:UD is better equipped than its predecessor to offer a substantial comedic reward when messing with players' apparent choices (or lack thereof). Between novel camera cuts and out-of-nowhere environment transformations, the game constantly shows how development studio Crows Crows Crows has only gotten better at this stuff after both the original game and the madcap nonsense of Accounting.