Please, don't say goodbye.

old art i posted back at November on instagram

the game is determined not to show you another living creature. you never see the narrator’s face. he laughs at you when you see that your wife is a lifeless mannequin. the crowds in the 3 ending are faceless. ‘mariella’ is an unmoving character model in an ending that you can’t interact with. all your friends are inanimate objects that the narrator is determined to personify.

it creates an amazing feeling of loneliness. my goal, when playing this game, became not to find the ‘true’ ending or break the game, but to find someone living, someone real, someone that isnt a bucket that the narrator speaks for to make this world less lonely.

the only time you do see someone else, a moving person, then, is the rare occasion in which you can see someone walking past one of the office windows. and it’s just stanley’s character model, and you don’t get to interact with them. you get to watch them disappear.

Loneliness is a theme in all of the TSP games, but it actually evolves throughout each of them.

The first game, the Half-Life 2 mod, is by far the loneliest of them all. There’s just Stanley, The Narrator, Mariella and The Curator. The halls are cramped, narrow, and dimly lit.

The HL2 Mod is a house that’s no longer a home, musty and claustrophobic. It’s more isolation than loneliness.

The second, the TSP demo, is less so. There’s evidence that people were here - papers on the floor, a spilled mug, etc. . But the loneliness is less suffocating because The Narrator is constantly trying to show you these cool new gameplay mechanics (in my mind he’s trying to distract himself from the fact that everyone has gone missing) and is taking you through so many different locations and giving you so many things to do.

The Demo is when you were a kid on a school trip to a museum or expo, and you got separated from the group.

The 2013 HD Remaster is a soft, looming loneliness - the documents left strewn about, the mugs left on desks, computers left open; people were here not too long ago. You get a couple phone calls from your wife, too. In this game, we have Stanley, The Narrator, Mariella, The Curator, Stanley’s Wife, the second Stanley and the Line™️ - there’s also evidence that 432 is still up and about, as a box labelled for them disappears after you leave the phone room in the Not Stanley Ending. Far more populated, yes, but only limited to certain endings and paths you can take.

(Also, to answer your question, it’s confirmed in a Reddit AMA: that’s another Stanley, but he considers you to be the “other Stanley”.)

The 2013 HD Remaster is arriving at an event several hours too late.

TSPUD, when I first played it, blew me away, and continues to do so, because unlike the previous games…it’s so alive.

You walk into the Memory Zone for the first time, and there’s birds. Fucking birds! Real animals! Do you have any idea how much that shocked me? In the Elevator Ending, there’s a rat on one of the chairs.

The reviews in the Skip Button Ending, Settings Person greeting you every time you boot up the game, the Bucket Tape Ending, the man that follows you, the second Stanley, the notes you get from your loved ones in the elevator ending (from Stanley’s wife, from his coworkers, you even get a drawing made by Stanley’s child!), the voice that promotes TSPUD in the New Content Ending, the child variant of the previous one, the voice that sings the Good Job, You Made It To The Bottom Of The Mind Control Facility, Well Done song, the chanting behind the mural in the Bucket Museum Ending, the cars zooming by in the release trailer…

It’s full of life!

It’s just beyond a wall, or a door. But it’s there. And whoever’s just beyond that wall loves you.

TSPUD is when you fall asleep at a party as a child, and you’re carried to your bedroom, and you can hear the muffled sounds of the party continuing on downstairs. It’s still there.

okay so. There's this poem I started making in 2019 and only just finished this year. And I was thinking about René Magritte paintings. So here we are I suppose

The poem is made of chopped-up lyrics from the following songs:

Unfortunately that was all we could find in the speckled polar toebean department. To make up for our failure, we humbly ask that you please accept these other non-speckled polar toebeans as a token of our sincerest apologies.

But why haven't I seen anyone talk about this?

BEASLEY????

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