The Beginner’s Guide came out on Steam last October as a much-anticipated follow up to Davey Wreden’s first game, The Stanley Parable. It’s not a sequel, so rest easy. The Stanley Parable was a great little game in and of itself; however The Beginner’s Guide felt like it had more weight to it.

A segment of The Beginner’s Guide, placed in space. (Image from AVClub)

The big similarity between the two games is that they’re both made in the Source engine, so the gameplay, look and feel, and sense of progression are the same. I really have nothing to say in this regard, they’re both pretty standard on this front.

Where they differ is the content of the story. They’re both narrative-driven. In The Stanley Parable, you play as Stanley. For the most part, it’s linear. There are multiple endings and it’s all very whimsical. It’s some good fun!

The Beginner’s Guide gets a bit more serious than I would have expected. It details the friendship of Davey and someone nicknamed Coda. Coda turns out to be Davey’s inspiration for making games, and through the game we learn the extent of their friendship.

All the humanoid figures that appear in the game take on this shape, more or less. (Image from The Jimquisition.)

Early on, Davey presents players with snippets of Coda’s games. They’re mostly short playthroughs, going through a specific point in each of Coda’s games. Each beginning is designated by Davey giving players a short description of what the circumstances were surrounding each game. Whether he or Coda was going through hardship, or whether they weren’t. He assumes that what Coda put into his games was a reflection of his emotions at the time.

The rest of this post contains spoilers for The Beginner’s Guide.

As the game progresses, we learn more and more about Coda through Davey’s monologues. The deeper we get, though, the more of an enigma Coda becomes. He’s this person who creates these weird, seemingly random games with no solution. He puts lampposts at the end of them as a signature. And the whole time, why? Why does he do the things he do, and why is Davey so obsessed?

This isn’t even the final level in the game. (Image from BoingBoing)

The final level takes place in a tower that Coda developed and sent to Davey. As you walk through the various pitfalls and traps that this tower has to offer, Davey monologues about how Coda has suddenly become closed off, reclusive, and seems like he doesn’t want to share anything with Davey. In previous levels, Davey remarks about how private of a person Coda was initially. After all, they met at a game jam. Coda made games, and that was pretty much all he did. Davey thought he was incredible… and by the looks of the game, he still does.

Coda didn’t share his work with anyone. He may have been reluctant to even share it with Davey, and when he did, Davey may have been the only person he showed, period. Sensing this greatness, Davey shows other people.

After what I assume would be the point where Coda finds out about Davey’s sharing his games, everything starts getting weirder. The games don’t make sense. They’re unsolvable puzzles, and Davey is perplexed by it all.

Going back to the final level, Davey tells us, pretty plainly, that Coda has cut contact with him. And rightly so, he even says himself. Davey had developed a sick obsession, and during the game’s final moments, Davey reads Coda’s final email aloud. It’s plastered on the walls, and there’s no way Davey can deny that he ended up hurting Coda more than he could have thought. But it’s all for the good of giving him recognition, right? Surely it was righteous.

This is one of the more disturbing levels in the game, and what I think is Coda’s most direct description of how Davey’s actions have affected him. (Image from BoingBoing)

No. It wasn’t.

Coda states that pretty clearly. In his levels, in his strongly-worded email, in the way that Davey feels about him after he cut contact.

And so we’re left with Davey’s guiltiness in ruining their friendship, and yet begging for Coda to at least talk to him again.

We’re left with a man who wants a resolution.

If you’re musically minded, the term “coda” might call up a definition, which would be: “a term used in music primarily to designate a passage that brings a piece (or a movement) to an end” (thank you Wikipedia). We know that Davey never learned Coda’s real name. Each level ends at a lamppost, and we learn that it was Davey’s doing, not Coda’s. Coda never intended to be a be-all, end-all for Davey, it just turned out to be that way, and I can’t help but think Coda planned that from the start.

Overall, though, The Beginner’s Guide gave me more of a plot twist than any other game has. Period. I was honestly expecting Davey to reveal himself as Coda, not reveal that he destroyed a friendship by being too proud of his friend and betraying his trust in the process.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the game, but it made me feel awful for rooting for Davey the whole time. He played the victim too well, and I hate that I fell into that.

I do still love it though, because I don’t think that any other medium would have been able to get the point across so damn well. The thing about video games is that a developer will create a world with complete control over how much you know about it. They literally build the narrative up right before your eyes, and to have it taken away and marred in just a few sentences is one I’ll never forget.

It goes to show that video games don’t have to be based in fiction, either. Often times we forget that creative nonfiction is a genre of storytelling, and I appreciate that this game is part of that realm.