I'm not quite 100 percent sure what occurred, but the creators of Stanley Parable have gone their separate ways. Wreden released the interesting The Beginner's Guide, and Pugh created a new team called CrowsCrowsCrows.

Anyway, CrowsCrowsCrows released a game today on Steam, and it is completely free, and it is only half an hour long at most. It also heavily features Simon Amstell. It's pretty excellent, and that's all I'm going to say about it for now, until some more have played it as well.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/409160/

Ooh, I saw someone talking this up on Twitter yesterday. I like Simon Amstell too. I'll check this out!

When I saw the title I thought it's an entry for Giant ROM.

Loved it. Really takes to heart the 'brevity is the soul of wit' adage. Hilarious, in that offbeat British manner, with a fair dose of witty cuts to gaming culture. Can't wait to see what else CrowsCrowsCrows puts together.

Very nice little game and well worth trying at no cost. It's quite reminiscent of The Stanley Parable demo. Though I'm not excited to see dozens of games attempting to re-tell the same joke over and over again now. Hopefully Crows Crows Crows make something distinctly different from that established style. The joke was really very fucking funny the first time around - don't drive it into the ground!

Seeing all those dumb-ass fake reviews and meme-regurgitating posts on Steam gives me the vibe that games like these might just attract terrible people. Still, limiting my response purely to the game, Dr. Langeskov is a wonderful and creative way to promote your new indie studio! The "dev commentary" really made my day among various other amusing moments.

The Steam Description is hilarious.

I think Jack from Friends at the Table (Austin's actual play podcast) worked on this game as a composer. Looks awesome!

I liked it a lot but I feel like you need to watch the trailer before you play it so you don't miss some of the premise. (at least I couldn't find it in the game)

Wait how the hell do you pick up those tapes?? I tried to pick up every single one.

@evilsbane: I completely missed it the first time too so there's a chance it's random but on my second playthrough there was a cassette recorder right at the beginning. Pick that up first and it will play any subsequent tapes on interaction. Worth it in my book!

Those cassette tapes made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt.

Thanks for the heads up, that was a fun ride. And I agree that it's worth a second run through just to listen to the tapes. Simon Amstell is pretty excellent.

It was interesting, makes me wonder what they are going to come up with next that I would actually pay for.

So, if you go to r/crowscrowscrows, there's a lot of theory's being thrown around that there is so much more to this game than meets the eye. Everyone is looking for hidden puzzles and clues and trying to make sense of everything. Most of everything seems to stem from the trailer where there is a lot of footage not seen in the game.

It's good, I liked it. I'm not Simon Amstell's biggest fan but he plays his role well here. I especially liked it when he wanted me to pull the elevator lever. On the other hand I didn't find the cassette tapes for the "pencils" idea funny; I seem in the minority on that one.

I still prefer The Stanley Parable demo (in some ways I found the demo better than the main game), but this was good too.

Just saw this! Jack was writer on the game!

How will I refund my money after I find it ethically objectionable if it's free?

"This heavily plagiarises a game in the mid-nineties narrated by Mark Lamarr. See you in court."

Man, Mark Lamarr. Where you at, man?

I looked around and didn't see any recorder on my first playthough (just finished it). The only thing I was able to pick up were coins and sticky notes which I didn't find out how to actually view later. I imagine maybe you can use the big calculator thing to punch numbers in?

It was a cute experience although I think the constant narration is somewhat at odds with all the text strewn around for the player to read. At least I personally found it super distracting when I was trying to read those letters and the narrator kept constantly cutting in. It's a great joke and works super well in Portal but when I'm actually trying to read things there is a strangely out of place sense of urgency I found a bit distracting.

Just played through this and found it really enjoyable! That Simon Amstell is very easy to listen to, and I was smiling ear to ear in most parts revolving around doing/not doing what he said. Not sure what some of the collectible stuff means--you can pick up coins and post-it notes--but I'm going to head back in soon for another go.