When the holidays approach, I am always ready to get into position.

I refuse to play your tawdry reindeer games, you holly jolly motherfuckers

Ah yes, December….not only the endgame of any given year, but the moment in the calendar when everyone well and truly stops giving any real shits whatsoever about the rest of the year, with each week being more profoundly plagued with apathy than the last. The wording chosen just now was very mindfully done, as I do view apathy as a conceptually infectious disease of sorts, and all it takes is for but one individual to be absolutely riddled with it, and to hang around a more weak and weary spirit, to pass it along as if some all consuming whirlwind of malevolent consumption, ready to completely cannibalize all in its path. I’m very mindful of this reckoning, having lived through many an endgame throughout time, so my thoughtful approach creates a hyper vigilancy that provides a proper edge, as if to view apathy with a prejudice lament, and not yielding in quality of similarity to something akin to zombisim, as it does a proper job of robbing the spirit and psychologically lobotomizing all it infests, a yuletide spawned treachery knowing no boundaries.

I bring this up before I start waxing philosophical and get down to the brass tacks of deconstructionism, as I’ve found that talking through what irks me aloud, helps me cope with the reality of such grimhorror show fairytales that manifest themselves unapologetically within my sphere. Others apathetic posturing will not necessarily paralyze my own sense of interest and ambition, given I stay at a distance, and keep my wits about me for the last month of the year. To that point, what better way to pass the time then playing and writing about video games, here in the turgid death throes of 2025?

I venture a spectulation, based on the historical precedent I’ve set here on Active Time Event, I likely only have the spare hours enough to get through one full game before we see 2026, and knowing this, I still gave the finger to fate, and decided to sneak in one more mini experience before moving onto what I think will be my final game of choice to close it all out with. Luckily, I had downloaded The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe Edition (SPUDE) about half a year ago, and was waiting for the right time to whip it out.

I put off starting SPUDE for a couple of reasons, first and foremost due to the fact it came out right as I was wrapping up a lot of heavy duty gaming projects, and was about to move on to well…the creation of this site, actually. At least, the transition from ATE 1.0 to ATE 2.0, which for the small cadre of fervent readers that have been at it for long enough with me on my writing journey, may remember my modest run up to a final farewell in the 1.0 version of this site by outlining my initial thoughts on Doom: The Dark Ages. Seems like an entirely different lifetime at this point, eons beyond me in the cosmic nether, and a realm in possession of powerful potency all onto its own mighty metaphysical majesty.

The second reason mentioned, was due to the notion that way back in 2013, when The Stanley Parable first released, I did what I thought was a rather novel write up of the title, that drew inspiration from its wacky proclivities of the autonomy of the user and the whimsy of seemingly non-choice in the matter. I think initially, in my mind, if I didn’t follow that up with an appropriate spiritual successor, when I finally got around to playing SPUDE, it would represent a creative failure of sorts, in not being able to match the energy, or at least provide another novelty in the written form. However, the more I thought about it, and the more time that elapsed, the more I concluded that this hypothetical sequel article was likely just never going to materialize, and I should just pull the trigger and get the damn thing over with.

Besides, at this point, while I am pleased to see SPUDE release to a lot of fanfare, for the lauded efforts of the original experience, everyone and their mother has done some kind of novel riff or parody focused article apeing the Stanley Parables style, so the only way to be different is to not be different. Or as Ozzy Osbourne once proclaimed to his son Jack about body art: “You want to be original? Don’t get a tattoo.”

To the point of expounding upon SPUDE (as in, The Stanley Parable, or TSP, as I realized how dreadfully putrid that first acronym truly is), in a meaningful way, does create a dilemma, as most of what the game offers is sharp writing based on spontaneity and what feels like humorously organic story beats, TSP being a satirically driven first person narrative “walking simulator”, to use laymen parlance for digestibility sake, so going into much detailing is indeed, like explaining the punchline before someone has even heard the joke. This forces one into using effective shorthand as describing the game as an authentic tribute to the wild machinations that represent the postmodern in design, and what would happen if Half-Life stopped taking itself so seriously, but since Portal already exists, we have to ammend the statement with; if Half-Life stopped taking itself so seriously, due to being commandeered by a self-aware batshit crazy British narrator that forced his way into the helm of a collective reality of adsurdist proportions.

Even a preview of TSP represents a dead-end, as if one was not creative enough and were to dictate upon the experience in a single run through like they would other video games, in following the most basic of outcomes to its fruition, one would only need about six minutes to see the finale, but the point of the game is quite obviously not in beating it, but in a sense, finding all of the ways to “not beat it” in the process. With many of the alt endings, from sequence breaking out of the “intended” map of the level design, to being trapped in a purgatory of monotony by a frustrated narrators voice, to being forced to play other video games, Stanley transferred directly into the middle of a stadium from Rocket League, after the narrator has exhausted his patience in trying to please Stanley, does an excellent job at not just creating a compelling experience in and of itself, but doing so without any real mechanics to speak of, almost none whatsoever that the player can utilize, aside from basic movement capabilities, which stands as a feat onto itself, but doing so while deconstructing game design, and providing a meta-narrative on the nature of video games as well? A cognitive tour de force of conceptually unparalleled palatiality.

TSP touches on some basic realities I’ve even discussed before on ATE, like the art vs product debate, the conceptual worth of walking simulators, what exactly does contribute to making a good game, the debate about the mechanics it takes to prop up said quality experience, and even the purest, most basic, raw sense of what the concept of “playing” even entails. The crazy thing about TSP, is it provides answers to all of these questions and more, and does so without almost any real tricks of interaction to speak of, aside from a sharp wit and cutting edge writing; swordless in its approach to claiming victory in the metaphysical realm of ironic conceptual conflict, by conquering with a creative meta-calamity, coalescing in the majestic coronation as a manically crowned king of coding madness.

The Stanley Parable is an excellent showcase in providing a compelling example of how the pen can be mightier than the sword.

-Pashford