The Stanley Parable is finally making its way to Xbox via The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. We spoke with Crows Crows Crows’ William Pugh, designer on the original game and director of Ultra Deluxe, about the game’s unique and hilarious achievement list.We love it when a developer puts some thought into its game’s achievement list, and Crows Crows Crows has done exactly that with The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe achievements. If you’ve played the original PC version of the game, The Stanley Parable (2013), the new list will feel familiar, though there are some subtle and not-so-subtle differences. Pugh says there’s a mix of both easy and hard achievements on offer with Ultra Deluxe: “There’s something for everyone here. Are you a baby? Literally two years old? Guess what? Smash the ‘jump’ button a few times and boom. Achievement. What’s that? Launching the game more than once? Achievement. What’s this? An achievement for getting an achievement? Achievement.””However, we also have incredibly difficult achievements such as ‘Super Go Outside.’ Let’s just say that you’ll have become an entirely different person by the time you manage to unlock that one legitimately.”The Super Go Outside achievement is a more brutal version of Go Outside from The Stanley Parable. The original achievement asked you to not play the game for five years, Super Go Outside doesn’t want you to play the game for ten years. Pugh says the reason behind this change was because Crows Crows Crows found that too many people were managing to unlock the achievement. “We hope this really motivates players to work harder…,” he notes.The achievement list was a group effort that followed a simple design ethos. “We try to have each idea within the game occupy its own space and to not have achievements, endings, choices, or whatever, bump too hard with each other,” Pugh says. “Rather than having ten similar jokes, we try and go with one joke that works the best out of all ten. This keeps a game where you mostly walk around and make choices feeling dynamic and surprising. You don’t want to repeat yourself. I said you don’t want to repeat yourself!”Of course, a lot of ideas for Ultra Deluxe were left on the cutting room floor. You may have already noticed the mysterious Test Achievement Please Ignore. Pugh says this was used to test a lot of different achievements. “We did a lot of iteration,” Pugh says. “We had a debug achievement for a while that was actually called ‘Test Achievement Please Ignore’ — we used this to configure and try out like a few dozen different unlockable achievements to see what sorts of variables we could get the game to track. However, we ended up with 11 excellent and unique achievements that we could end up bringing to every single platform.” What exactly Pugh and Crows Crows Crows decided on for Test Achievement Please Ignore is currently a mystery and will be left for players to discover. One achievement that didn’t quite make the jump from The Stanley Parable to Ultra Deluxe is another that’s also shrouded in mystery. For those that have played The Stanley Parable on PC, the Unachievable achievement is infamous. “It is impossible to get this achievement,” reads its description, and while it turned out it was, in fact, possible to unlock the achievement, the requirements for doing so were unclear. As per The Mute Gamer, players were popping Unachievable, but they couldn’t figure out why, and the Steam forums were soon filling up with different theories on how to actually unlock it. However, once a method for unlocking the achievement was found out and divulged in the forums, a sneaky dev going by the username Gran PC would secretly update the achievement’s requirements in the game’s next patch so that method would no longer work — the ultimate troll indeed. Players were having such a hard time trying to figure out why the achievement wasn’t unlocking for them, they eventually ended up reverse-engineering The Stanley Parable’s code to devise a way to force unlock it. In the code, they also found that despite meeting whatever criteria Gran PC had set for the achievement, it still would only unlock for every one in fifteen people. So how do you get the Unachieveble achievement?To this day, it’s still not exactly known how to get Unachievable to pop legitimately, as many players have reported it unlocks in a variety of different situations and after different periods of time. Pugh, briefly expanding on the story of Unachievable, says Gran PC was “always one step ahead of those achievement hungry gamers” and that the achievement was so high-security Pugh wasn’t sure if he even managed to unlock it. Sadly, or not so sadly depending on how you look at it (I personally love the idea of this achievement), Unachievable doesn’t feature in The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. Pugh says that this one and a couple of other achievements were either cut or changed “because we just couldn’t get multiplatform consensus.”That doesn’t mean you’re getting off scot-free, though! We’ve already mentioned Super Go Outside, but there are also some other dastardly achievements that you’ll need to work hard to unlock, such as Commitment, and the very creative, Settings World Champion — which will either be very easy to complete or an absolute nightmare depending on the different number of settings. Whatever the case may be, players will surely have a lot of fun uncovering the mysteries that await in The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is out now on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
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