10 Video Games That KNEW You'd Try To Cheat - Commenter Edition
2. The Stanley Parable - The Serious Room
Originally a humble mod for Half-Life 2, Davey Wreden's The Stanley Parable has become a cult phenomenon for its thought-provoking take on the nature of player choice and decision-making. Think of it as Bioshock but with shooting bees out of your hands replaced with bumming around an office disobeying a vaguely patronising narrator.
The game has several different endings depending on the player's level of co-operation with the narrator, ranging from protagonist Stanley being freed from the mind-control facility to the player being teleported to an unwinnable level from Portal. One such climax, known as the "Serious" ending, is reserved for players attempting to mess with the console's cheat commands.
Upon opening the console and typing Source's iconic "sv_cheats 1" command, the player is immediately teleported to the "Serious" room, where they are sentenced to stay for "one hundred billion trillion years" as punishment for not taking the strict order of narrative events seriously.
Trying the command again ups their sentence to "infinity years". One final attempt results in the narrator giving up and searching for some more serious furniture for the serious room. You know, to make your infinity year sentence even more serious.