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Comment by exodust | Hacker News Reader

Never understood the appeal of stanley parable or beginners guide. After the initial fun wears off, the constant abuse and sarcasm from the narrator is abrasive and noisy. Not as clever as they're hoping. The Beginners Guide even worse. Empty test levels strung together with tedious narration.

The developer's depressed? That's the least interesting thing to learn about anyone. Depressed people promoting their depression sounds disingenuous.

Not to be all negative, for walking simulators with no interaction but nice dreamy atmosphere, try Liminalcore. Relaxing and calming, great on an ultrawide OLED. Lots of vast shadow areas. Huge scale architecture. Bump the FOV setting up a little from default. No cheap gimmicks, just a restrained dream world with subtle hint of something lurking in the shadows. In terms of artistic walking games, this is one of the good ones.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3107900/Liminalcore/

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I personally absolutely loved the Stanley Parable demo and then the game. For me, the magic was a constant sense of disbelief that the game would let me do that. Like early on, I managed to clip out of the window and found myself outside... only for the narrator to berate me about it. I spent most of the game in a competition with the game itself, where I would try to outsmart it, and it would (almost always) turn around and have planned for that contingency already. I had hours and hours of downright glee playing it.

The remastered version didn't really hit for me though. It had a huge amount of new content, but I wasn't there for the content. I don't think it could create the same magic, because I had had a few years to digest the experience. I understood the game, and so the game could not create the same "there's no way that X will happen" kind of moments because of course it would, that was the whole point of the game.

Fair enough. I mentioned "initial fun". I enjoyed it to a point, but recall it abruptly ends and seemed unfinished, unresolved. The berating was cute at first then gets old.

Compared with a game like Portal, with similar self-referential quirkiness. Even had its own meme "the cake is a lie". That was a resolved game. Stanley on the other hand... I won't hammer the criticism because I'm glad games like this exist.

>Empty test levels strung together with tedious narration.

For me that's a big part of my disappointment, it needed to do a lot more with the game aspect. For some reason he kept referring to an empty Counter-Strike map as a "game" and it kept me from being immersed.

I think it hits harder when you're in high school or early 20s maybe.

> The Beginners Guide even worse. Empty test levels strung together with tedious narration.

> The developer's depressed? That's the least interesting thing to learn about anyone. Depressed people promoting their depression sounds disingenuous.

I wonder if you played The Beginner's Guide to the end? Not that it necessarily would have changed your mind, maybe the conclusion didn't strike you as it did me (even seeing it coming).

Not him, but I did play it to the end, and it didn't "strike me". By the end, I was finding it more of a chore than a story I could enjoy, although I was a bit annoyed from thinking it would be more interactive (I remember some article I saw about it talking about how it explored the story through a series of games, but the final product doesn't really have any actual games).

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