Game Review: The Beginner's Guide

When I first played The Beginner’s Guide three years ago, it left me with a profound desire to create. To write. To make something that I could enjoy, even if no one else could. As someone who has, at various points in life, seen myself as a “creator,” The Beginner’s Guide resonated with me like no other work has. Replaying the game for this review, I was reminded why: it’s a game that explores the unspoken challenges of not just game design, but the creative process more broadly. It’s a work of art for anyone who’s ever struggled to make art. Not exactly a guide, but something close.

The Beginner’s Guide is Davey Wreden’s follow-up to The Stanley Parable, and the two games have some superficial similarities in their approach to storytelling. Both are first-person “walking simulators” which feature a narrator who becomes a primary character in the story. The similarities largely end there. While The Stanley Parable features a charismatic British narrator who guides the player through a series of choices, taunting them to humorous effect when they disobey him, the narrator in The Beginner’s Guide is Davey Wreden himself. There are few choices to be made, and the overall narrative progresses unchanged regardless of the choices you do make. The game isn’t funny. It’s immensely sad.

It’s important to understand the game in comparison to The Stanley Parable, since much of Wreden’s design choices are dependent on the player being familiar with his past work. Right at the beginning of the game, the narrator introduces himself as Davey Wreden, creator of The Stanley Parable. He even gives us his email address so we can send him our thoughts about the game. This introduction of the creator as a character immediately grounds the game in a sense of reality, blurring the boundaries between the world of the game and the real world. Of course, those boundaries can sometimes be important, so from here on I’ll be referring to “Davey” when referring to the narrator as a character and “Wreden” when referring to the designer himself.

I’ve talked a lot about the game, but I haven’t yet explained the actual premise, so I suppose I’ll do that now. Also, be warned, anything after this point might fall into what you might consider a spoiler.

The Beginner’s Guide is framed not as a single game of Wreden’s creation, but as a collection of games created by a friend of Davey named Coda. Davey tells us that he’s curated these games and released them publicly as a means to contact Coda, who has gone missing and stopped responding to Davey’s messages. Throughout the game, we are told that each “level” is actually a game that Coda created at a certain point in their career. In effect, we’re meant to be experiencing a timeline of Coda’s work. At first glance, one might think we’re meant to be learning something about Coda.

It’s all fictional, of course. That isn’t to say that there isn’t a real Coda, or that Coda wasn’t inspired by a real person. It isn’t even to say that Wreden himself designed every “game” within the collection (although he almost certainly did.) What I mean to say is: within the world of the game, it isn’t important who Coda is or whether he designed all these games, or whether the events Davey describes actually happened to Wreden in the real world. What’s important is what Coda represents: the creative process, and Davey’s relationship to the creative process.

This comes to light in the game’s crucial final levels. In “Chapter 14: Island,” we play as a character searching for a “machine.” Or rather, trying to fix a machine. Or rather, trying to reconnect with their lost creative spark. Something like that. We walk around, guided by text on the screen, promising to show us the machine. When we arrive, we find nothing but a wall of text filled with quotes from past levels, past games created by Coda.

In “Chapter 15: Machine,” we finally find the machine. It’s name is Coda. The level ends with the player transported to a sequence of areas from previous levels, armed with a rifle the player used in one of the earliest levels. The player can shoot anywhere, breaking down the boundaries of the world around them, destroying Coda’s past creations. Finally, we’re faced with the machine, armed with our rifle. We shoot, because what else is there to do?

When I first played The Beginner’s Guide three years ago, it left me with a profound desire to create. Of course, the shameful fact is I never did. I never found my machine, my Coda. Or if I did, it was broken, and I never bothered to fix it. Or tried building my own machine. Or tried any other number of things aside from shifting the blame for my stalling creative output toward forces beyond my control. Replaying it again three years later only reminded me of all this.

I tried a lot of different approaches to writing this piece. There were so many other things I wanted to talk about: the way the mechanics of the game conflict with Davey’s professed belief in games as “playable” or “interactive” media, the unique use of recurring gameplay mechanics as a motif, the way those mechanics are eventually subverted at the end, the game’s level design in contrast to The Stanley Parable, the differences in final product resulting from a single “auteur” designer or a collaborative team, even just each of the individual levels could merit its own review. But somehow I always came back what I saw as the game’s focus on the creative process, and how it struck me so much. Like Davey, I couldn’t help but see someone else’s work as some sort of creative lifeline for my own work. Davey Wreden hasn’t made a game in three years and even though he owes me nothing, I feel like I’m still waiting for something.