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If you haven't experienced The Beginner's Guide - I highly recommend. It's one of my favorite experiences. I look forward to playing through his new game, even if it's a bit different! I'm fully aligned with the goal of trying to convey your sense of self through artistic creations and think he's in a league of his own in his attempts to do so.
Would you still recommend it to someone who didn't like Stanley Parable? I must admit I found his prior game to be extremely boring and pretentious, but I'm willing to have an open mind about the new one if it's different.
FWIW I strongly disliked The Beginner's Guide—I wasn't a huge fan of the Stanley Parable either, but The Beginner's Guide was significantly less enjoyable even so. I know the game gets a lot of positive reviews, but if you're on the fence already, I'd strongly caution you against blindly trusting the reviews.

There's definitely an element of personal taste, though—I tend to really dislike media that I find overly philosophizing (i.e. when I feel like the authors' arguments are too confident, or otherwise discourage the audience from thinking themselves about the arguments or conclusions). That is to say, I might be precisely the wrong target audience for this sort of game :-P

I'm not too keen on the Stanley Parable and enjoyed the Beginners Guide. It's definitely something that could be called pretentious but I feel like it's a lot more interesting with how it does it. There's less of a fixation on humour too which is a plus for me because The Stanley Parable's humour grated on me a lot of the time.

It's a walking simulator though, if you're not into those kind of things in general then you're probably not gonna be into it.

> I must admit I found his prior game to be extremely boring and pretentious,

You definitely won't like it. The Beginner's Guide is much more in that direction than Stanley is.

I’d say the beginner’s guide is more pretentious, but it’s not as funny.

I still really liked it, though.

The Stanley Parable, The Stanley Parable Demo, and The Beginner's Guide were all “merely” Source mod “walking simulators”, but each of these games had a degree of precision in how they executed their vision that made them feel like very high-quality products, each in their own way. Yes, the nature of these games is such that there's very few “moving parts” that require coordination to provide a cohesive experience—it's mostly just the standard Source first-person character controller and interactable objects you can press +use on, with a narrator narrating the story—but each of these games felt solid to play, with the intentionally minimal “gameplay” getting out of the way of the intended narrative experiences these games sought to provide. I wanted to like Wanderstop on its own terms, but once I got out of the portion of the game that's accessible in the demo, I found myself honestly really underwhelmed by the game's presentation. The intended narrative gravitas of the first dialogue with the first NPC that comes to visit was ruined because one of those little penguin dudes happened to be walking by near her feet, so she kept glancing down at it during the dialogue sequence in a hilariously immersion-breaking way. The guidebook you're given is a series of flat textures, with no animation for turning pages or anything like that whatsoever. The opening “cutscene” is presented as a series of still images like a motion comic, and a couple of the “animations” within them looked amateurishly terrible.

I'll try it out again sometime soon because I (want to believe I) still like Wreden's writing, but my initial experience with the game wasn't the best it could be by a longshot.

Shout out to The Stanley Parable Deluxe Edition. Even if you played the original, you should play this. Without giving spoilers, it's basically an entire sequel, not just a Remaster.
Second this, Ultra Deluxe is a worthwhile purchase. It gives you enough new content to more or less triple the size of the original game.

But play either game any way you can; if you're a fan of Douglas Adams novels, you'll feel right at home.

Frankly, the demo isn't really a demo, it's a prequel. You might enjoy the demo if it's been awhile since you've played
Yes! The Demo, the original game, and the Deluxe Edition could almost be considered a trilogy of games.
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/

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).

Can either game be played on a modern Mac? Steam says it's only for 32-bit Macs.
I've had this problem with a few older games that came out in the 2010s. The easy thing to do is to run it with a tool like crossover, or run the game through Apple's Game Porting Toolkit. I recommend just using crossover's 2 week free trial if this is the only game you're having trouble with

Crossover - https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover?gad_source=1&gbraid=0A...

Macs don't have compatibility libraries? Containers? That sort of thing?
Haha that’s funny.

No, they don’t. Just like Microsoft’s obsession with backwards compatibility, Apple is obsessed with changing things constantly.

They have VMs :D
That chap is a marketing genius. Articles ostensibly about him are effectively a promotional tour for his new game (available in all good stores prices $xx.xx)

If you're thinking of buying the game, though, read its reviews: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1299460/Wanderstop/

And remember... it is a cosy game. That's what you'll be playing. If you like cosy games, then it's a good cosy game with an interesting Wredenesque storyline running through it. If you don't like cosy games, you won't like this game. It's not a deconstruction of cosy games. It is a cosy game.

The new yorker wasn't tricked into marketing his game, they make marketing articles like this all the time. I feel like 9 times out of 10 when I see an article on HN it's some barely disguised ad for a book masked as a human interest story. (PG has a blog post about this.)
Betting it's not him but his publisher. There is a massive industry dedicated to this sort of guerrilla marketing these days. If a company of a certain size is putting out a press release they will coordinate to have seemingly-unrelated articles show up in various news sources (think New Yorker but also, like, ArsTechnica, or even the HN frontpage.) Even though the articles aren't technically ads, they get the name out there so it's on people's minds, making them more susceptible to hearing about/engaging with the news.

I've seen this happen internally at my last employer, but have the impression that it's standard operating procedure in corporate marketing these days. It is quite gross and I'd like to see it banned wholesale (or at least the relationship should be mandatorily disclosed). But... we would need to believe as a country in regulating ourselves to do that.

I recognize that I have been pretty fortunate in life, but I've never been "overnight success, will never actually need to work again" fortunate. I struggle to sympathize with "I got everything I ever wanted, and now I'm depressed". That framing for the article does not exactly have me chomping at the bit to play his newest game.
Framing this in terms of The Beginner's Guide, I think it's more like:

"I just completed a project into which I poured not just all of my time and energy, but also all of my self-worth. It was a massive success. Now I have nowhere to place my self-worth. Doing this again would be both (1) unlikely to succeed, and (2) extremely toxic, just as doing it the first time kind of was. So how do I get out of this mindset without completely destroying myself?"

Amusingly, his response to that question was to make a game about it.

Few people get rewards on that scale (and thus the chance to exit, or at least the time to think about it), but many develop similar relationships to their work (or art). An exploration of the problems in that dynamic (as in The Beginner's Guide) is therefore relevant to a lot of people.

I think depending on what you've built your identity around, suddenly being free of having to strive for anything can be pretty daunting. "Having everything we need, indefinitely" is certainly not something we were prepared for by evolution, and the questions that arise when you are at that point and still need to structure your life around something don't really have easy answers, I believe.

So it might actually be a pretty good sign that you struggle to sympathize with this, because the alternative might be that you understand it all too well.

Depression is not about the world. It's about your own internal state - the way your own brain is wired up. To a first approximation, "I am depressed" is a statement about a particular neuron not getting stimulated, which is only related to how your life is going in indirect ways that - like all proxies - leak a lot.

If tomorrow the greatest dream of AI was achieved, and we had a perfect benevolent AI that would shepherd humanity to comfort and safety forever, that would be just about the best outcome imaginable in material terms. But I think I'd be unhappy with it, because I derive a lot of my personal sense of worth from what I do - from what I build and for what I contribute to other people. I don't know what I would do in a world where that was no longer needed. I'm great at being helpful! I suck at being fun.

Is that healthy? Probably not. (It's actually something I'm working through at the moment, that I increasingly understand as a consequence of both personal and societal-level abuse.) But we're not all healthy creatures. We live our lives as the people we are in each moment, including the ways in which we're dumb and flawed and insecure.

It happens a lot in creative fields. I personally get depressive after putting an album out, and I know I'm not alone in that based on discussions with other musicians. Something about being in the mode of making something for so long, and then it's just... done. When you're deeply involved in something, it changes your personality.
The lack of sympathy is understandable, though I do think becoming depressed after a huge success is probably very common. You've spent so much of your waking life for years working towards a goal and then you attain it, and maybe that success no longer needs your hard work, so there's a massive vacuum in your life. Obviously there's more to life than business success and it'll take time to find your purpose again, but that come down, I think, is natural.

It reminds me of the article about one of the co-founders of RxBar and how he was finding it hard to search for meaning after they sold their company for hundreds of millions. It was posted here years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21138106

I think it's really more of the "like a guy who had gotten rich making jokes about video games, trying to deceive real writers into thinking that I’m a real writer." feeling he mentions in the article than just being successful. I can't say what actually was going on in his head, but I can imagine making what you see as a joke and then having it get huge, you receive massive praise for it, and people demand more and more of it and consider you to be "the guy who made that funny joke back in 2011 and should tell it again but better" would relate to his issues. The newest rerelease of it really felt like he wanted to move on for good.
It does sound counter-intuitive.

However "Post Adventure/Mission Depression" is very common.

See e.g. https://worldextrememedicine.com/app/uploads/2022/07/Lukas-H...

As a person in tech, I have met many millionaires and a few billionaires, and it is really true that huge wealth does not in, and of itself, bring happiness. They're basically still stuck with their old problems, but now also surrounded by sycophants and leaches.

"Wherever you go, there you are"

No amount of fame or success will alter who you truly are inside. If anything, laying your happiness at the foot of external validation from others in the form of critical success or fame is a poisoned apple.

There are plenty of examples of wildly successful people unable to manage their own demons -- see Kurt Cobain or Anthony Bourdain.

If you take a look at someone like Markus "Notch" Persson, he was on a roll of being incredibly famous and at the head of one of the best-liked games in the world.

It was too much pressure at the top, though, and he sold the project to Microsoft and became a billionaire; but what that actually meant is that Microsoft took it over entirely, and he was nothing. He didn't even get the position of "esteemed creative inventor who now only occasionally provides creative direction instead of being responsible for every last thing", that some people get when they sell their projects to faceless behemoths.

He had a further fall from grace in that the public didn't like his stated values on social media, and Microsoft took the opportunity to completely erase him from Minecraft - removed all mention of his name, and he's not invited to anything.

So now he sits alone in his mansion and cries himself to sleep, because while "never work again" money is nice to have, he'd rather have the kudos and recognition of being the creator of a much-loved game. And that's the one thing he can't have any more.

An adage that I find more true than false through my own experience: It's harder to manage success than to manage failure.
Why doesn’t hackernews just link directly to the archive?

I’m guessing 99% of readers don’t have the paywalled version.

It’s super annoying.

I think many people, myself included, would argue that that's immoral. The fact that you don't want to pay for access to The New Yorker is fine, but it doesn't mean that we should facilitate your desire to not pay, and that we've effectively normalized ignoring even reasonable copyright rules is a real problem for the industry (we can argue about the merits all we like, but pretending we shouldn't have to pay for an article with little public interest, published this week, is pretty absurd).

We can look at aggregators like HN as a way to curate who you should be giving your money to, or we can use them to facilitate infringement, making publishers rely on sketchier and sketchier methods to stay afloat.

start paying for your news. you won't regret it. three decades of free news leave you hanging bored and annoyed and misunderstanding humanity.

if you want to stay tethered to this reality, commit to the pot. it's recursive and cumulative. otherwise you are left to research from free sources which leave you in 'directed' narratives, divergent and polarizing, devouring your fallacies while feeding off your bias.

free beer is never a better of the available choices.

He should go back to making half life 2 mods.
I think if he could go back and figure out what made the original Stanley so great, he would.