The Stanley Parable Review

A man leaves his desk, a narrator tells him what he does next, and you decide whether to comply. That is the entire premise, and Galactic Cafe wrings a startling amount out of it because Kevan Brighting's narrator is written as a genuine antagonist rather than a gag delivery system. Disobey and he improvises, sulks, retaliates, and eventually builds whole rooms just to make a point about how little your defiance is worth.

The joke could have run out inside ten minutes. Instead the branches keep folding back on themselves, and the best endings are the ones where the game stops being funny and starts being uncomfortable about what a designer actually does to a player. Mechanically there is almost nothing here, just walking and doors, and the Source engine office is drab by design. Judge it as an argument rather than a product and it is one of the sharpest things anyone said about interactivity that decade. Short, cheap, impossible to unhear afterwards.