Beginners Guide
If you read the blog section of my site, you’ll notice that one of the first posts I made on this site was expressing a desire to be able to write again . I wrote that a year and a half ago, and since then, the most I have written is the posts in that blog, these game reviews, and one short story based on my experiences as a COVID survivor. More than I’d written in the years before, yes, but not exactly what I had in mind.
I know why I stopped writing. I know why, since 2017, my creative world has been blockaded and dead. I’ve failed at a lot of things since I tried desperately to start again. I started this site as a gallery for my photography , but I know they’re not very good. I may, at some point, actually share some of the music my band makes, though that too, I know is not very good and not worth sharing. Even sharing my jam recipes would be something, but I don’t do it. I don’t even share the jams.
I’ve failed at a lot of things. I have tried a lot of things, and I have failed most of them. It’s something I try to reconcile with, try to bargain with, try to understand, but in the end, what I’m left with is the thought that what I create is not worth anything, and so I save myself the heartache if I don’t share, or if I give up entirely.
I say this, because I know this moment:
I know, because this is what I have been yelling at my own brain ever since it stopped being able to write.
I’m not here to say definitively what The Beginner’s Guide and all its symbolism means - that’s for each person to extract for themselves. What I am here to say is that I derived something from this game that was visceral and painful, and still hasn’t left. Whether this is meant to be autobiographical for its creator or any of the other myriad of interpretations, I found myself in it, in much the same way Davey found himself in Coda’s games. He needed to play Coda’s games to understand Coda. I needed to play The Beginner’s Guide to know…something. I’m still not sure what. But that sense of falling away from yourself, that sense of what keeps you alive and going disappearing, and screaming into the void to try to get it back, I needed to see that someone else - fictional or not - understands that.
I play games and write reviews as a form of escapism. I stream games to assuage my guilt about playing so many games, and I review them as a way to mentally justify the hours and hours of my life spent living in someone else’s world. I think too hard about these worlds, share too much, and all in the hopes that someday, it might mean something, though I know it never will.
And The Beginner’s Guide understands that. Whatever else is true, The Beginner’s Guide seems to understand where I am, why I’m there, and what it feels like to be here. I don’t know that I was ready for that.
I’m aware that this is less of a review and more of a stream of consciousness, but when the goal of a game is to get me thinking about art and how I interact with it, and the end result is me looking long and hard at my relationship with my own art, that seems to be successful. There isn’t much to comment on about The Beginner’s Guide’s gameplay or mechanics - there are none, and the point is the narration and the ideas. I didn’t know what to expect going in, and I’m still not sure where I am coming out, but that it’s stuck with me so long and left me quivering with thoughts about my own escapist tendencies strikes me as the mark of a game well done.
Or, to put it another way, it has not failed.
Developer: Everything Unlimited
Genre: Storytelling, Walking Simulator
Year: 2015
Country: Canada
Language: English
Play Time: 1.5 Hours