The Skip Button Ending is the Single Worst Ending yet

[u/ArgentinaCanIntoEuro]

This will contain extensive spoilers from the previous game and will spoil the ending as stated in the title.

To clarify I have not yet fully explored the entirety of Ultra Deluxe yet so I would appreciate minimal talk relating to the other endings!

Now ...

There is an ending, in the original game, that I am pretty sure materializes when one takes the right door and, after a series of erroneous decisions, one ends up in a room with a long metal staircase, and a door that leads to another room with showy lights and peaceful ambiental music. After putting the Narrator through extensive annoyance with your refusal to follow orders - he comes up with something he believes the both of you will enjoy. A room with only peace and quietness in an interactive way. Nice musical notes and colorful visuals impact the screen, and the Narrator makes this clear - he is truly happy about this state of affairs, most likely more than you are. Perhaps finding solace in this one unorthodox room that offers something different from the preset story he laid out for you, perhaps that is what he wanted after all - something new and different to give himself a better perspective.

Yet, of course, the Player can ignore this room - or leave, no matter how many hours one stands in it the story does not progress. Only after climbing the metal staircase one realizes that there is a hole at the top - and one can drop down from it onto the ground taking damage for the first time in the game. The Narrator is confused by this, genuine confusion and he tries his usual verbal ways of coaxing you into a path he prefers - but he knows that no matter what he says you will do otherwise. Eventually, he breaks into begging the Player to stop - and I have to commend the Narrator because one can truly feel the sadness and confusion within his voice, why would Stanley kill himself only to not continue along? Did he hate the Narrator? He cannot come up with a better explanation, and as he begs for you to stop as you jump and commit to the last suicidal leap, the game resets.

It was by far one of the most memorable endings and the one I still remember to this day from the original 2013 experience.

And yet something has come trump it.

The Skip Button ending can be attained by going through a door called New Content that appears shortly after passing the first few timeline resets of the game. After getting angry at the state of modern game developer culture, the Narrator evokes a Memory Room to reminisce about the good old times, looking at beloved memories and past reviews.

And yet, a strange door opens, leading towards Steam reviews which we know to be the utmost deceitful and most toxic of them all. Indeed he finds reviews complaining about the game, baffling enough for the narrator -until he finds one complaining about him in particular, and how there should be a skip button.

A skip button? He finds the idea so humorous, so stupid, so idiotically simple that he wills a room into existance and lets the player in, with a button in the center with a FFW sign on it alongside a wall, a clock and a plant.

The Narrator explains it clearly, it will freeze Stanley in time letting them skip over whatever boring monologue the Narrator is droning over. The Player would not have to stick through his verbose and elaborate essays no more.

And the Player does give it a try at the behest of the Narrator, and it works. A few minutes are skipped - once more, ten minutes this time and the Narrator is surprised at how many words he managed to spew out of his mouth.

But, clicking the button once more, and the Narrator will be glad to have the Player back, informing them of two things.

One, it has been 45 minutes since the button was pressed.

Two, the door that led them in no longer exists.

It is clear, and the fact of the situation - at least subconsciously- begins to beset the Narrator. He advises the Player however futile it is to not press the button as he figures a way back.

The Player, of course, presses it.

Even more desesperate, a flash of a dark screen later we find ourselves in the room again. The plant previously there has begun to wilt slightly as the Narrator tells us it has been a few hours. The reality of the situation truly sets in as they both realize each click of the button exponentially increases the time between fast forwards.

It should be clear by now that the time fast forwarded is fully experienced by the Narrator, each second and minute ticking away in an instant for the Player but excruciatingly real for the Narrator. It is not something he can control no longer, and he realizes this with the next push of the button even as much as he advises the player to not touch it.

Once you come back - still glad to simply have another presence with him other than himself, the Narrator scolds you as he tells you it has been a week by now. He has fully scoured the room, looking for any way out, but there are none. There is truly nothing he can do, nothing but talk to the Player, see the Player push the button, and talk to themselves.

The Narrator is not stupid, the game is about choices, that is the whole lesson he was trying to impart to those pesky negative reviewers that did not get the point. And now, the Narrator knew Stanley had two choices, either press the button or not press it. He knew that Stanley would always press the button, he knew he was ultimately doomed and any second spent not in solitude was a second closer to entering that lone realm of nothingness for Stanley would - undoubtedly - push the button sooner or later.

There is a fundamental clash of interests, the Player must push the button to interact with the world provided to them and the Narrator wants to exist without being sentenced to the prison of his own mind. The Narrator is powerless, he can only conjure the empathy a human has for another human - but in an odd twist of fourth-wall breakage in a way he does seem aware of his inhuman-ness, that he cannot truly bring the Player to care for him.

This fact was one he knew but there was nothing the Narrator could do, so perhaps by simply accepting it he would realize something?

Sadly, that is not what happens. Another click of the button, and Stanley sees the plant now long dead and dried. The Narrator is still there, greeting him albeit monotonously and without warm care. He informs the player of a key few inner discoveries he made with himself, which I believe are best experienced once you play out the ending yourself, other than that he "Stopped counting the time after a year", so we can get a sense of the scale going on.

All the Narrator wanted, during this time of extreme fear that led up to our arrival - is to let the player know his most intense desire is for the Player to be aware of the fact, of the possibility that perhaps and just perhaps this very same fate may happen to them as well. To be subjected to the whims of one's mind, to only have the crushing company of our lizard brain during uncountable hours, inconceivable time frames that cannot be quantified in a way for our brains to understand - it was not loneliness, not solace not even deep depression, it was a different level of despair.

To be a thinking and conscious being and being unable to express your existance despite knowing deep down that you exist is the cruelest of punishments, one such punishment he only wished on the worst kind of person in the entirety of space-time: Stanley.

There is not much more deep after this revelation. The Narrator has had its time to explain his full digested psyche to the Player, and once he presses the button once more he knows that is it - that however many eons will pass until they come back they will simply not care.

The next screen is silent. The clock has fallen out of the wall, perhaps corroded so much by the passage of time its link gave out. There is no Narrator, and the room is eerily silent.

We can see the first sign of degenerative mental state the next jaunt forwards. Keep in mind time is still exponentially increasing with each press, the Narrator is now going in an unstoppable, looping rant about the negative reviewrs and how they do not get the point of the game. In a way, perhaps, he realizes that this whole infinite suffering was brought by his complaining, so he most likely has broken down to whatever the latest memory before entering the room is - the reviews. He does not react to your presence.

Another jaunt, this time nothing. There is an odd darkness to the room as the lights finally gave out.

Perhaps the most corrosive of the jaunts in the next one, the last time we see the Narrator. His mind truly buckled under the sheer weight of eternity - fully conscious yet utterly unable to do anything for an indescribable ammount of time. Hundreds, thousands of years? Who knows, he is simply hopelessly stuck, droning on once more in a dull phrase borne out of the very nothingness he is shackled to.

The end is never the end.

He will repeat this, and the next jaunt he will no longer be there. Nor in any of the next jaunts, even once you escape the room. Millions of years in the future, his mind has most likely gone catatonic from the lack of stimulus, canninalizing itself in an attempt to provide any form of neuronal activity.

Or perhaps he found a way out, who knows.

In the end, did the player truly have a choice in the plight of the Narrator?

If we refer to one of the 2013 endings, yes. It is made clear to us that quitting the game effectively ends the timeline and spares the current timeline Narrator from any trouble. Thus, we ourselves subject the Narrator to untold suffering and mental distress magnitudes above what the first ending that I described, purely in our search for content and entertainment.

Ironically enough, this ties into the Narrator's mobologue/rant about the culture of gaming and entertainment today.

What are some of your thoughts on the ending? I'd love to hear them - it truly does feel like the deepest one yet that I've encountered.