In my first play-through of Stanley, I gave the game the benefit of the doubt and did absolutely everything it told me to do; the game’s voiced-over narration explains which path to take, and I did what I was told. The result is a boring, cliché videogame narrative that takes only a few minutes to complete: the protagonist, Stanley, has been mind-controlled by a mysterious machine, and when he discovers this, he turns the machine off and escapes to the real world. The game ends with Stanley outside, finally “free” of having been told what to do … the irony being that I, the player, have done exactly what I was told to do by the narrator in order to achieve this result.
"The way to "beat" this set of endless staircases is to turn around. Turning around will not take you back down the hallway that you used to get to the stairs; it will take you to a new room entirely. In most videogame-and in, y'know, actual rooms in real life-turning around will take you back to the place you just were. In Antichamber, going backwards often results in discovering a totally new area. "
