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.