Davey Wreden made The Stanley Parable in 2013. Two years later, he followed it with something harder to hold. The Beginner’s Guide came out on October 1, 2015, for Linux, Mac, and PC, published by Wreden’s own Everything Unlimited Ltd. with Klei Entertainment. It is not a game you win. It is a game you walk through while a man talks at you about his friend.
Trailer, via Davey Wreden.
A Game Jam in 2009
The setup is simple and strange. Wreden narrates. He met a developer named Coda at a game jam in 2009. Coda made things — abstract, unfinished, often melancholic — and then deleted them or forgot them. The Beginner’s Guide walks the player through those creations from 2008 to 2011, mostly half-built exploration games, in rough chronological order.
You move in first person. You look at what Coda built. Wreden tells you what he thinks it means about Coda as a person. That is the whole loop.
The player cannot die. There is no way to make a mistake or lose. Some sections have puzzle solving or conversation trees, but the stakes are never failure. When a section is too hard or impossible as designed, Wreden’s narration simply helps you past it — he builds a bridge across an invisible maze, for instance. Once you finish a chapter, you can replay it, or turn the narration off entirely and wander the spaces alone.
That last option is the most interesting thing in the game. It is also the one the game seems least sure it wants you to take.
Prisons, Isolation, and the Difficulty of Talking
Wreden reads Coda’s work as a record of a mind closing. The early games are odd but open. Later ones turn darker, take longer to make, and lean harder on dialogue that suggests development had stopped being a good thing for Coda. One game near the end pushes his creative frustration, in Wreden’s phrase, “up to eleven.”
Wreden got worried. He thought Coda might be depressed. So he showed Coda’s concepts to other people to get feedback, hoping to encourage him to keep making things. Coda pulled away instead. By sometime in 2011, Wreden believed Coda had stopped.
That is the story The Beginner’s Guide tells, and it tells it with a narrator who is not neutral. Wreden offers his own analysis of the themes he sees — prisons, isolation, the difficulty of communicating with others — and the player is invited to accept that reading. The game’s stated premise is that you can understand a person by going through their files and documents without ever meeting them.
The Beginner’s Guide knows that premise is shaky. It keeps testing it. Whether it lands depends on how much you trust the man doing the talking.
What the Narration Gives and Takes
Wreden has said the game is open to interpretation. Some players read it as commentary on the relationship between developers and players. Others read it as an allegory for Wreden’s own struggles with the success of The Stanley Parable. Both readings fit. Neither is confirmed.
The tension is built into the mechanics. Wreden’s voice guides you, interprets for you, and rescues you when a level defeats you. Turning it off is the only way to see Coda’s work without Wreden standing between you and it. But turning it off also means losing the help, and some spaces become impassable. The game makes you choose between a clear reading and your own.
That is a sharp idea. It is also where the game draws its harshest reviews. Some reviewers found Wreden’s conclusions forced, even pretentious — a narrator telling you what to feel about art that might not support it. The criticism is fair in places. Wreden’s analysis sometimes outruns the material, and the game rarely steps back to let a space breathe without comment.
The Score
The Beginner’s Guide is a metafictional account of one developer walking through another’s abandoned work, and it is best when it stops explaining and lets the rooms speak. The first-person exploration is spare and deliberate. The narration is the point and also the problem.
It is not a game about solving Coda. It is a game about the urge to solve people, and how that urge can push them further away. Wreden built that idea into the controls, which is more than most narrative games attempt. The execution wobbles when his voice crowds out the silence, but the silence is still there, one toggle away.
KEY FACTS
– Release date: October 1, 2015
– Platforms: Linux, macOS, Windows
– Developer: Everything Unlimited Ltd.
– Publishers: Everything Unlimited Ltd., Klei Entertainment
– Genre: Adventure, Indie
– Mode: Single player
– Perspective: First person
– Score: 7.5 of 10
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