An Overdue Achievement

I wish I could say that I finally managed to get that Hollow Knight achievement that I have been working towards for a while. Unfortunately, I’m not quite there yet. However, recently I realized there is another achievement that I have been waiting on for a long time and last week’s discussion reminded me of it. There was an interesting narrative-driven game that I played back in college. You may have heard of it. It was called The Stanley Parable. At first, one could think of it as just a glorified walking simulator with an enthusiastic narrator. Of course, that is just on the surface. What makes the game unique is that your choices direct the flow of the narrative. If you have ever read one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books, this is in the same vein. The main difference is the attention to the idea of free will. In Choose Your Own Adventure books, the book simply gives you the option to choose how you want with no idea if you are making a good choice. In The Stanley Parable, that is not the case as the narrator tells you the story you are supposed to follow. However, if you exercise your free will then that can cause changes to the narrative that lead to the story being altered and sometimes breaking down entirely. All in all, it is a fun experience with numerous hidden dialogue options that you can find over multiple playthroughs. However, that’s enough about the game and let’s start talking about that achievement.

Now, I should first start out by saying that before doing anything, the first thing one should do is go into the extra settings in the menu and turn on achievement. You even get an achievement for that. That way you should be able to get all of the achievements as you play through the game. Well, almost all of them. One of the most creative achievements is the achievement called “Go Outside.” This achievement is unusual in that it is an achievement that is based on real-world time. This achievement simply states that you cannot play the game for five years. Yeah, that’s right. You cannot get that achievement without waiting for five years since you last played. Now, there may be some ways around that, but I personally decided to take that challenge. It has been so long since then that I forgot about it until recently when I was reminded of this game when writing about Inmost. I wasn’t sure at first if this would actually work and if I had spent five years not playing the game for no reason. Thankfully that wasn’t the case as I got it to pop up immediately after booting up the game again. Then I got distracted and played for a little bit.

I can’t think of many games that have such a long waiting period for achievements, but I am glad I came back to this one without having to mess with my settings or anything. Who knows, I might try to get some of the other achievements I was missing now that I can play this game again. Were there easier ways to do this? Most likely. But as someone who doesn’t mind dropping a project for a while so he can pick it back up later, I felt content knowing that after all this time, it worked. That’s all that matters to me. I’m not saying I recommend this approach, but considering the number of games normally in my backlog, this wasn’t a difficult waiting period. Well, that’s all from me. See you next week!