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S1 Ep18: The Stanley Parable
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This is a story of a story of a man named Stanley (major spoilers, but not entire).
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Transcript
Introducing Stanley and His Mundane Job
00:00:01
Speaker
This is the story of a man named Stanley. Stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was employee number 427. Employee number 427's job was simple. He sat at his desk in room 427 and he pushed buttons on the keyboard. Orders came to him through a monitor on his desk, telling him what buttons to push, how long to push them, and in what order.
Welcome to the Soapstone Podcast
00:00:31
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. I am Jake, joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? Sounds good. Dave's actually here. I will be speaking for Dave tonight. Hello.
00:00:49
Speaker
Pretty, pretty, uh, convincing Dave impression. I just did there with the hello, but you know, I'm here. I'm here. I'm sorry. I'm quiet. It's just who I am as a person. When people ask you questions, you're just like, it's fine. What are we talking about tonight, Dave?
Discussing The Stanley Parable Game
00:01:06
Speaker
Based on the intro. I want to say Stanley parable. Yeah. I guess it's kind of a given. We can speak and spell it out for people. Stanley parable, uh, game came out a while ago. Nobody cares when he came out, but.
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah. That's pretty much it. Yeah. So I could have sworn that I owned this game because I remember playing through several of the endings and then I went to Steam till I feel like, all right, let's like install this again, play it. And it's like, you don't own it. So I bought it and played it more. Interesting. I remember I was playing it around the same time together. Yeah. You're like, oh, did you get the one ending where XYZ? You're like, oh, yeah, that's cool. So cool.
00:01:49
Speaker
Because you hadn't hit puberty yet. That's what your voice sounded like. Oh man, everything is cool. Oh wow. It's up to school. That sucks. School sucks. But yeah, what kind of game is Stanley Parable? Is this a co-op? No, it's a single player, first person.
00:02:08
Speaker
Kind of a walking simulator in a sense. We just kind of go through an area and you have a narrator, but that's at a very face value, what the game is. These are mechanically the base components of the game, right?
00:02:24
Speaker
It's definitely a WASD game. Look around the mouse. Can't jump. Yeah, this is one of those. This is probably the last source game I played. It's got that classic half-life kind of menu. Oh, yeah. If you look at all the textures and models, yeah. This could have been built in Gmod. It might have been, but I don't know. Also, going back to graphics or not,
00:02:49
Speaker
Crazy intensive? No. Things had to scale down on my monitor. Yeah, it was the default of some ridiculous resolution. And I mean, it basically is like Half-Life 2 style, as far as graphics are concerned. You don't really play this game for the graphics, necessarily. I'd say it's more about the experience, as many walk-ins... Oh, wow. That's what a heartwarming statement.
Stanley Begins His Exploration
00:03:15
Speaker
But Stanley Parable, you play as the intro conveyed as Stanley. Start out in your cubicle and you haven't gotten any input for the day for your machine telling you what buttons to press. You're like, all right, how do you go about this? Like, how do you set out to make this right? So the first thing you hear is the narrator kind of go,
00:03:40
Speaker
Well, after he explains the situation, he's like, oh, and Stanley leaves his office to go find where all the fucking co-workers have gone. Yeah. Because nobody's in the office. And you kind of like walk out, look around, you see a very disheveled office. There's kind of papers strewn about, tons of those cardboard boxes filled with random folders and documents. Yeah. Empty desks and machines just kind of strewn about. It's just like a nondescript office from any movie that has an office in it, basically. It's office space. Yeah. The other one.
00:04:10
Speaker
The the the only interesting thing probably at this point that stands out is a little bit weird is if you look outside everything's like bright white you don't see anything outside the building. Which is just the game's way like it's sunlight you didn't want to draw
Choices and Endings in the Game
00:04:25
Speaker
anything else out. You can't see anything else but already at this point maybe maybe you didn't maybe you didn't leave your office maybe as soon as the narrator was like hey
00:04:35
Speaker
uh you should this is when stanley left his office to find out what was going on you could disobey you could close the door right at which point uh the game ends and i guess that's the quickest completion you could probably get that's the speed run strat yeah close the door wait a couple seconds yeah the game itself is kind of dictated by the narrator and the guy has a really nice eloquent voice and describes things as you act them out or as you're about to act them out
00:05:05
Speaker
and you kind of have these choices as you go along for do I want to linger here, do I want to interact with this, do I want to go left, do I want to go right, up or down, and you kind of choose where the story goes. Now you don't know that initially,
00:05:19
Speaker
I think typically most people's first playthroughs are you listen to the narrator, you follow his instructions, and then you, in quotes, beat the game. Or you get an ending. Yeah. And there's like a couple choices involved in that. Going through one of two doors, following down a path, going upstairs, like punching a key code in your boss's office.
00:05:43
Speaker
going through all of this and the narrator tells you exactly what to do. There's no other way to really have the key code, but he'll tell you exactly what it is. So you're just following exactly what he says, which is that I believe the ending I got in both of my playthroughs, the first one, and then this one, the one I focused on first, was just the obedience playthrough, basically, right?
00:06:05
Speaker
Yeah. And as you first do that, you're like, okay, you've probably spent about seven minutes doing that. And then you get credits and you go back to the main screen. Yeah. And an achievement for completing the game. And so you get a little bit suspicious. Like I just spent 15 or 20 bucks on this game was 15. What the fuck was that?
00:06:24
Speaker
So you're like, well, I'm going to play again. Cause as you went along, you saw some divergent paths, you saw like a sign that said escape or some other things. You're like, well, I'm going to just try something a little bit different and see what happens. Yeah. Appreciate some giggles. And at this point you've already had like, so the, uh, the ending for obedience is you get to walk through these giant doors into this, like really.
00:06:49
Speaker
Like, it's a nice looking neighborhood, blue skies, greenery, all the things that are basically absent from the office. And the narrator's like, Stanley's happy. He's found his freedom. All of this, like, positive stuff. Which, as it turns out, is probably one of the most positive endings to the game, is just doing exactly what you're told. Maybe.
00:07:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting a lot of things online have said this is pretty much the freedom ending you go through as Stanley who's always been pushing buttons and doing as he's told and you as the player Push your buttons and do as you're told to get to the end to achieve quotes freedom, right where you're no longer Controlled by a voice and input. Yeah, even though it's exactly exactly what you did, right?
00:07:41
Speaker
But yeah, that's the first ending. So on subsequent playthroughs, one thing the game will do is it'll change things up just a little bit, depending on what you
Game Dynamics and Subsequent Playthroughs
00:07:51
Speaker
did. So I think if you get the freedom ending first, nothing particularly changes. Maybe one of the monitors at a coworker's station has an input you can select, but that just fills one bar on the monitor, and then nothing else changes. So you're just like, yeah, whatever. I'll just go through and get a different ending or something.
00:08:09
Speaker
But then as you go through subsequent playthroughs, that'll persist. You can actually fill up that bar on the input. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely some sort of trigger that actually resets it because I got to a point where the selection wasn't showing up for me on other people's computers. Or maybe I wasn't finding the one computer that had it.
00:08:32
Speaker
Um, yeah, usually right after that obedience playthrough, you're like, okay, well, my first main choice was, uh, listening to the narrator and going through the left door. So this time, you know, we'll mix it up. We'll go through the right door, but which takes you to, I think the best room in the game, the break room.
00:08:50
Speaker
yeah which has which has a they have like a nice touch for this because the narrator is like you already said narrator's voice is amazing it's absolutely great and for some reason they pick this one room and the map where every time you enter the break room the narrator describes stanley's happiness and feeling of euphoria in this break room and increasingly intensive tones where it's just like
00:09:19
Speaker
Like could a man possibly love a break room, you know just continually crazy Which I just I love that
00:09:29
Speaker
But eventually after enjoying your time there in the break room and taking a load off, you got to continue into the much more open loading dock room, right? Yeah. And that one's probably the biggest room in the game so far. There's a lot of stuff to look at. And it doesn't really make any sense. Like there's a flat platform with no railing around it. And it's just like, oh, it's got like a yellow border
00:09:58
Speaker
Clearly meant to be important. And he's like, oh, the narrator's like, Stanley steps onto the platform and continues upward. And so you can get on the platform and it'll take you to a higher level, which is, here's your divergent choice. Do you stay on the platform? Do you jump off? Do you jump off onto a railing below you, right?
00:10:24
Speaker
The thing is though, you can't actually jump in the game. Right. Do you walk off? Yeah, you have to walk off. But at this point, you're not sure if you can fall and land, which a lot of people try, and then you die. But then you're like, well, there's kind of like a railing here. Maybe I could land there instead. Yeah.
00:10:43
Speaker
So if you just drop off, the narrator just sarcastically congratulates your bravery and sense of independence, but you just died. You gotta reset it from the beginning again. And that's a fun ending to get. It's the powerful ending.
00:11:03
Speaker
The other one would be stepping off onto the platform, which continues further off into chaos and a lot of other endings. But if you stay on the platform, it'll take you up to a hallway that eventually leads to a phone. And the narrator starts to talk about how it's like, this is the thing that matters, Stanley. She's waiting for you. You just need to answer the phone.
00:11:31
Speaker
But as Stanley, you can't really speak or do anything. You can just move around.
00:11:39
Speaker
click buttons at most. So there's two divergent paths here, although the second one actually took me a while to figure out. One is answer the phone, in which case you get warped to an apartment, presumably Stanley's apartment, or you could disconnect the phone, just yank it out of the wall. But for this one, I answered the phone
00:12:02
Speaker
ended up at Stanley Lee's apartment and there's a voice of a woman inside just like, oh Stanley, you know, I'm so glad you're home. Let me just get this fresh, big bread out of the oven. And then like the door opens and her voice just gets really like distorted and weird. And it's just like a mannequin. The narrator just starts laughing at you. He's just like, I can't believe, you know, you thought all of this was for you, you know. And then you walk back in, you walk into the apartment as you walk in.
00:12:30
Speaker
and he's like, he starts to describe how Stanley has spent so much time in the office just pounding on these keys, right? Just doing what the computer tells him that he started to fantasize about how maybe all of his co-workers had vanished and he's investigating why that might be and you know, he has a wife and he has all this stuff.
00:12:53
Speaker
And the game has you just push buttons on your keyboard as you do this to continue kind of the story. And every time you push a button, his apartment turns into his office, like switches out like part of it for like a desk or something like that, right?
00:13:11
Speaker
Yeah, it kind of just brings you back into the place that I think Stanley is the character he's trying to mentally escape from. Exactly. Which is kind of why you have all these different endings and paths you can take. Even the premise of like all of your coworkers being gone and going into your boss's office and finding like a secret pathway and like a mind control machine and all this random... I'm gonna use a Jake quote random BS.
00:13:35
Speaker
is just because Stanley's been doing such monotonous things at like a very boring desk job for years. We don't even know how long. Exactly. It's just he needs some type of mental escape. And this is a recurring theme is different endings for the Stanley parable will
00:13:55
Speaker
they'll claim themselves as true. Basically, they'll give you a definition for what's actually going on, and they'll all contradict each other. And this is one of them. So after he's finished explaining the sad state Stanley's in, and requiring you to hit these buttons, he'll say,
Narrator's Role in Player's Journey
00:14:13
Speaker
it's like, Stanley, it's very important that you don't press that next button prompt that pops up. And then the button prompt pops up.
00:14:21
Speaker
And literally nothing will happen until you press it, in which case the game starts to put you back into your office. Yeah, one of the beauties of the game is how meta it gets. Because we talked about the initial playthrough where you kind of go up into your boss's office and you're looking for a greater meaning behind everything that's going on.
00:14:43
Speaker
And if you go through the second time and you've just recently gotten the key code for your boss's office, you're like, oh, I already know what to do. Let me just input that quick. Right. So you can put the key code before the narrator has a chance to go through it again. Right. Your speed running. Yeah.
00:14:59
Speaker
Oh, here it is. And then the narrative goes, well, hold on. Kind of like Stanley's jumping ahead of the story. Maybe Stanley needs to take a load off and relax a little bit listening to some new age music. So you're now just stuck in the room and something Enya-esque kind of plays for like 30 seconds. He's like,
00:15:19
Speaker
No, that's good. Don't you feel better? Because you're trying to cheat the game. Exactly. This is on the route towards that original obedience ending, if you usually end up in your boss's office.
00:15:34
Speaker
the narrator is perfectly satisfied with you just listening to exactly what he wants you to do and just doing exactly what he wants you to do. So anything to kind of deviate from that throws him off a little bit. And this one like even more than most because sometimes you go like off track and he's just like, Stanley went through the right door because he's really dumb or something, you know, whatever. Yeah, but he'll try and be like, but then he went back this way to connect where the story needs to go. Exactly.
00:16:03
Speaker
But the narrator tries to keep you on track. One option is instead of going into the boss's office, you can actually go to a side passage and there's an elevator there. And if you step into that elevator, it'll start to play some music for you.
00:17:07
Speaker
Shake those maracas.
00:17:13
Speaker
And I was kind of tired when I was playing. So that music you guys heard, obviously, very chill, very smooth. I was like, all right, this is a perfect opportunity. Dave can't judge me. I'm going to just keep listening to this. We'll be sciencing up the game by seeing if anything changes, if I just stay here in the hotel. Not the hotel, the elevator. And I just laid down on the floor with my wireless headphones. Just listened to that for a while. It was great.
00:17:42
Speaker
I'm glad you do your own research for the game in your own ways. Yeah. But yeah, can confirm. Does not change. Just plays music for as long as you're in there. But eventually you gotta leave that elevator and you can resume
00:18:00
Speaker
the path through this secret passage in your boss's office to follow down where the obedience ending would have taken you and you enter this very large room kind of on a catwalk that is just completely surrounded by monitors, right?
Themes of Control in Stanley Parable
00:18:18
Speaker
Yeah. You have the option to hit the first button and it kind of illuminates the entire giant kind of a column
00:18:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's like a cylinder kind of like hollowed out. It's a huge room. Filled with all these screens and they all illuminate and each one is tied to an employee number and you can see their office, like there's a camera in everybody's office and you can even find yours.
00:18:43
Speaker
Certain ones are off. Some guys have fired, right? Yeah, some of them say fired. There's one that just marked pirate instead of anything else. As you go through the walkway, you have this realization like, oh my God, all these terrible things are happening. I've been in control this whole time. Yeah. And that's why I'm this boring. And this is why I do these actions. Exactly. Because I'm essentially programmed to by the higher ups. Yeah. This is your matrix moment, right? Your reality is a simulation, which makes sense with the rest of the game setup.
00:19:13
Speaker
But continuing through that walkway, you enter a large room that's just completely full of computers and buttons and equipment and there's like a circular area in the center with a walkway over it with a red light spinning around it. You're just like, oh my gosh, what does all of this stuff in this room do?
00:19:34
Speaker
It looks entirely official and you have colored buttons in different symbols and shapes. Yeah. One of them is even like the brimstone symbol from Binding of Isaac. Really? I didn't actually catch that. That's actually great. The room I think is basically, you could best like describe it as like a mad scientist's assistant room, basically like where all his employees work. That's what it looks like. It looks like a spy movie room to me.
00:20:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's like where James wanna be held right next door in the torture chamber. And you're inside here with the vaulted walls and all of the cool lab tech. Yeah. And the way open before you at the far end of the room takes you across a very dark, there's barely any light in the room at all, catwalk to a platform that has a mind control switch. And the narrator's like,
00:20:26
Speaker
Stanley is Stanley's made it he's he's here at the end he can free himself and all of his Co-workers finally escape and this is all this is again basically doing what the narrator wants you to for the most part or at least diverting back to that course and if you You know flip that turn my control off Then that's exactly what the narrator says Stanley does you get the happy ending? Exactly the wall kind of comes down you get to walk outside and see how pretty it is. Mm-hmm
00:20:56
Speaker
And the narrator kind of remarks, Stanley still kind of wondered what happened with his boss and why everything was set up that way and where all his fellow coworkers are. But eh, whatever. The game kind of ends there. Yeah. So when you go back that second time, you're like, all right, well, screw you. I'm going to do the, I'm going to turn the mind control machine on. Yeah. See what happens there. Press the other giant button. Yeah. And the narrator kind of gets frustrated. And he's like, why would you, why would you do this? Yeah.
00:21:25
Speaker
He's like, you know what, Stanley, if you're going to direct the story, that's fine. But what Stanley didn't know is that that button was actually tied to a detonation switch for the whole facility. And then a timer kind of starts up and he says, Stanley had two minutes to frantically panic what was going on with everything.
00:21:46
Speaker
Just deal with his mortality. And at this point, most people are going to run back to the room they were in. And suddenly, you realize that all of the switches you saw, maybe these are the solution. There's buttons numbered 1 through 5 at all these different locations. There's things where a pattern might flash up on a screen or a color that might correspond to a switch at someone else's station. There's all these combinations. You can try a password, inter-password button for one of the consoles.
00:22:16
Speaker
Just a ridiculous number of options for players to try to solve this, right? But none of them do anything. Like, they all are just red herrings to make you think that there's a way to escape this ending. Yeah. And he kind of remarks like he likes seeing you going around frantically trying to figure out a way out of this situation. But it's all to drive home the fact that he wants to dictate the story. Exactly. And that you kind of took the reins when he shouldn't have.
00:22:44
Speaker
Yep, Stanley's not in control here. And Narrator likes his control. So two minutes elapsed, detonation, and the end is never the end, is never the end, is never the end. Is loading. Yep. As your loading screen is, you end up back in your office. So compared to some other, because we kind of said this was a bit of a walking simulator.
00:23:08
Speaker
Normally in walking simulators, you don't have much in the way of choices. You're kind of given a path and the story kind of happens around you. Right. How do you think this ties in comparatively?
Non-linear Narrative Experience
00:23:21
Speaker
Like, why do you think they did this differently? What do you think they're trying to convey?
00:23:25
Speaker
I think part of it is they wanted to subvert people's expectations, especially when this game launched. It wasn't at all obvious what it was about, really. You knew it was the rough outline for Stan Lee and not having his coworkers around, everything like that.
00:23:45
Speaker
The game is actually, I feel like the game conveys what it wants to convey best. If your first playthrough is your obedient one, if you just go all the way through, because that's what a linear game would be. Yeah, that's what your standard walking simulator would be. And anybody I think would be in a fairly similar boat.
00:24:04
Speaker
Like if you purchase the game yourself at least. Cause like you said, you're going through kind of a walking simulator, but then you want more than that seven minutes of gameplay to explore other options. Exactly. But for me, I had the game and I think in like the first day or two, I had gone through most of the endings and I was talking about it with friends about what endings did you find in looking things up online? Right. But then when people would come over to my place, I would say here, play this game. Yes. Like, what is it like?
00:24:31
Speaker
Don't worry about it. Just do your own thing. I won't comment. And it's interesting to see what people do because a lot of people when they're putting the situation of here, you try as soon as they get a direction of like Stanley took the door on his right. You're like, fuck you. I'm going left. Yeah. They think that they're going to try and break the game. Right. But instead they're just following a different path and getting a different ending. Yeah. Because it's all one big game.
00:24:59
Speaker
Yeah. I was talking to you a little bit before this and I said, like, on one hand, it is a walking simulator. It is like, by definition, your only main control is interact and move around. You can't jump. You do get an achievement for trying to jump. And eventually after trying enough times, it's just like achievement get, you can't jump. But it's, it's also kind of a rebellion simulator. It's like.
00:25:23
Speaker
figuring stuff out regardless of what you're told to do. Yeah. Cause anytime like if you're, you're playing through this game logically and you're just, you know, mapping decisions and paths in your brain, um, you might, you know, you might rebel, you might go through that other door, but then another choice will come up and he'll say like, Hey, Stanley went to get back on track. And now you have another choice. Now you're like, do I continue to rebel or do I get back on track?
00:25:47
Speaker
how far am I willing to go with this and that's where like the content of the game just branches out from and I think it's like if you were gonna play the game obviously you probably should have played it before listening to spoil the whole thing but like you said inviting a friend over having them play the game like that's that pristine experience
00:26:07
Speaker
that usually walking simulators are the type of game to present to you. It's where everything is paced out and tailored so that the player is experiencing exactly what the developers want. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this one pulls it off without being strictly linear, which is, I mean, it's not linear at all.
00:26:33
Speaker
No, it's kind of like a chaos spider web in a sense. Yeah. Where you have all these branching paths and you can kind of choose what to do and how you do certain things. One of the things which I want to go back to, if you go the other way through the conference room, shortly thereafter there is a broom closet.
00:26:50
Speaker
Right. And if you go into the broom closet, the narrator kind of comments, it's just a boring broom closet. Stanley left the broom closet. Yeah. And if you keep going back through subsequent playthroughs or hang out in there, he gets, you know, kind of frustrated. Irritated, right? Yeah. There is actually
00:27:08
Speaker
If you stay in there long enough, he keeps commenting separate things like, like, all right, I get it, Stanley. I'm sure you heard through it online. There was some type of broom closet ending where he just completely breaks the fourth wall saying, but there's, there's not. Do you really want to like say to your friends like, Oh, I got the broom closet ending. Just go back and follow the path. Exactly. And you can actually get a broom closet ending. If you just wait in there, he's like,
00:27:34
Speaker
Fine and then like the game ends and restarts But then through subsequent playthroughs if you go back to the broom closet, he hasn't boarded up. Yeah, you can't go in anymore. None of that nonsense Yeah, this this game is very self-aware sometimes they're trying to tell you Sometimes the game will try to tell you a story within the universe and that can be impactful in its own way.
00:27:57
Speaker
And sometimes games understand that it's a player playing a game and use that to full advantage. And this is one of those games.
00:28:09
Speaker
There's a lot of different paths you can take to go to a lot of different endings. We can cover some of them, but some of the interesting ones, one of them is the narrator actually gets preempted by another. There's a woman's voice who begins narrating. And it just happens like right before the narrator has delivered you into basically a death trap. There's like these two giant smashers on like an assembly line essentially of containers.
00:28:37
Speaker
And he's just like, Stanley's going to die. And then this female narrator takes over and basically creates a way out for you. And then you can go through what is an art gallery of literally the game's assets. Exactly. Development phase and everything.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yeah, it has like concept art and other things. And it's full fucking meta game. It's beautiful. It's absolutely great. I got that when I came back and played through for this episode. And one of the things that was great for me is I saw a picture of an early level design. And it's like, oh, this was the level design sent in as a sample from the person we hired as our level designer. Things like that usually.
00:29:23
Speaker
I gotcha. There is no fourth wall left to break. It's just gone. Yeah, fourth wall breaks, fifth wall breaks. All walls are broken.
00:29:33
Speaker
And this is after like exploring this art gallery, you kind of descend through the, I think it's like an elevator and end up in a similar situation to where this female narrator found Stanley and she's going forward to this giant crusher. And she's like, this time, like I can't get you out of this. It's like, if you want to save Stanley, you need to pause the game and restart, you know, quit, start another run.
00:30:01
Speaker
because I can't save you this time. This game is all about exploiting your curiosity.
00:30:09
Speaker
And this is one of those times where it's like, ah, maybe it's not quite over yet. Maybe there's more to this ending. And if you don't restart, then you get crushed. And you have to restart anyway. You have to restart. So the game keeps you guessing, which I think is really the draw for this particular game, given that mechanically it's not difficult. It's all about finding out what the consequences of your choices are and where they lead.
00:30:39
Speaker
Yeah. When you're so limited on just movement and looking around and like a one button interaction, you really start to explore a lot. Yeah. You start peering more into the other office spaces of your coworkers, wherever they may be, or into other rooms and hallways, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Um, one of the things I found through exploration in the conference room itself, there are a lot of like dumb, funny things written on the whiteboards. Yeah.
00:31:08
Speaker
such as employee 402 and employee 405 want to get rid of the death sport portion of the primary review schedule. Which is just, they have all these like little dumb comments of just people in the workplace and things that are seemingly out of the workplace or go into your typical synergy and coherence and all this other stuff.
00:31:31
Speaker
A bunch of buzzwords and things like that. I like this because we're looking at the board right now. Work harder, comma, work harder. You mean work harder, hard worker? Yeah, that is what I meant. Jake's eyes are not what they used to be, folks. We were going to start a GoFundMe for his contacts. Oh my gosh. It's probably a good call. Another one is more water coolers.
00:31:58
Speaker
And then to balance that out, there's more water cooler heaters. It's glorious. Yeah. Just the, the sense of humor here is amazing. There's a lot of other little things in the game and a lot of endings that we did not cover because I think a lot of it is better found on your own exploration.
The Best Way to Experience the Game?
00:32:19
Speaker
Cause there's certain endings where it just, it gets in deep and it's really fun to go on that journey yourself.
00:32:27
Speaker
I think sometimes it's fun to tell you guys we're going to spoil everything, like in the description for this one, and then not. And it's basically like a demo where you thought you were getting the full game. So, yeah. Yeah, usually we just want to preface like, hey, we're going to spoil some things, but we're too lazy to spoil the full thing. We still want you to check it out. It's like 15 bucks on Steam. Yeah, it'll go on sale too. Yeah, it's always on sale. You wait for it. Single player.
00:32:53
Speaker
Or if you know me and you're at my apartment, you can play. Just ask me, whatever. People drop by Dave's apartment all the time. Dox me. Please, Dox me. Don't Dox Dave, please. Then you'll find me. All right. Well, I appreciate everyone sticking to the end of this one. As always, if you have any ideas you want to send in, you can email them into us at...
00:33:19
Speaker
Yeah, email them in to us at soapstonepodcastgmail.com. Feel free to like us on Facebook. Facebook.com slash soapstone. This is a really short episode though. This is abnormally short. I don't know if I'm comfortable with a 34 minute podcast that's coming up on. Hey man, not everybody can like last that long. It's fine. What happens to everybody? Yeah, but I like to pretend that I can.
00:33:46
Speaker
I think we should just take what we've got now, cut it, copy it, and double our length. Oh yeah, just kind of pat it out. I did giggle at your comment there as well. But yeah, that sounds good. Let's do that. Yep, sounds good. Alright, we'll see you guys in just a second. This is the story of a man named Stanley.
00:34:10
Speaker
Stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was employee number 427. Employee number 427's job was simple. He sat at his desk in room 427 and he pushed buttons on the keyboard. Orders came to him through a monitor on his desk, telling him what buttons to push, how long to push them, and in what order.
00:34:35
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. I am Jake, joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? Sounds good. Dave's actually here. I will be speaking for Dave tonight. Hello.
00:34:53
Speaker
Pretty, pretty, uh, convincing Dave impression. I just did there with the hello, but you know, I'm here. I'm here. I'm sorry. I'm quiet. It's just who I am as a person. When people ask you questions, you're just like, eh, it's fine. What are we talking about tonight, Dave? Jake, we can't actually just cut and paste the whole episode again. I mean here, I have something else we can do to pad out time.
00:35:18
Speaker
You know what? I think what we need right now is a bit of music to lighten the mood.
00:36:44
Speaker
Oh
00:37:51
Speaker
We'll never run away
00:38:37
Speaker
of the morning.
00:38:53
Speaker
Oh, oh
00:40:26
Speaker
Cut the music, go back and look at that fern. Stanley, this fern will be very important later in the story. Make sure you study it closely and remember it carefully. You won't want to miss anything.