You Can Now Unlock A Rare Stanley Parable Achievement

In the era of games as services, it's uncommon to find a game that rewards you for not playing. Then again, The Stanley Parable is no ordinary game. Yesterday marked the title's fifth birthday, and thanks to that passage of time, you can now unlock one of The Stanley Parable's weirdest and most rare achievements: Go Outside.

Go Outside isn't tied to anything you can do it in game. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The achievement reads, "Don't play The Stanley Parable for five years," requiring that players not so much as start the game for that amount of time. Those who dove in on launch day and never came back have satisfied the requirement. Those of you who've recently played the game, totally unaware of the achievement? We hate to break it to you, but you reset the clock.

The Stanley Parable's Go Outside achievement is a perfect fit for such an unusual game. Throughout your time inside this indie gem, you're constantly being told what to do by the narrator. But most of the fun comes from contradicting his narrative, forcing him to either correct himself or scold you for going off script. The Go Outside achievement is yet another way that The Stanley Parable attempts to twist your mind into a pretzel, because it forces you into making an odd choice: either leave the game alone, even though you might want to play it, or simply disregard the achievement entirely and play to your heart's content.

The choice is yours.

The Stanley Parable released on Oct. 17, 2013 to critical acclaim, with IGN hailing it as "something that's intriguingly opaque, but always entertaining, and genuinely funny." You can download the game via Steam, though you might want to hold out if you're a newcomer. The Stanley Parable is discounted pretty regularly during Steam's seasonal sales.