10 Ingeniously Clever Video Games That Will Mess With Your Mind

8. The Stanley Parable

How much autonomy do we really have when we play games? Say you play a seemingly linear game with a narrator, what would you do if you could defy that narrator, and if you do defy that narrator, are you really liberating yourself from the story?

These kinds of closed-loop questions are ones you'll keep asking yourself when you play Stanley Parable, which can best be described as a meta-game commenting on the nature of gaming itself. It entails you wandering around a deserted office as the titular character, listening to an omniscient narrator who tells you which way 'Stanley' goes at each juncture, but then deciding for yourself whether you want to go the way he says or not.

There are countless endings which range from the mundane to the charming, to the strange and surreal - as varied as venturing into the worlds of Minecraft and Portal, or Stanley committing suicide.

Is there are right or a wrong choice? Who the hell even knows anymore...