So... The Beginners Guide

[False Messiah]

I was surprised that there isn't a topic for this game.

I just played trough it and I have to say it did touch me at times. I'm feeling unsure if the game is a walking simulator, a self-absorbed work by a creator who made an unsuspected hit with the Stanley Parable. Or a genuine insight into the troubles any serious creator has felt.

I think he made this in response to people reading too much into his previous game, but that may be me reading too much into it.

What do you think about the Beginners Guide?

 

[Totenkreuz]

I was disappointed. I walked into this blindly expecting something like "The Stanley Parable" as it was advertised something along "from the creator of..." on Steam's storepage. I know the fault, in the end, is mine and mine alone and if I don't get a refund from this then I will take this as a 'damage done, lesson learned' scenario for future purchase.

Don't get me wrong, the game was functional but it was not what I believed it was or wanted.

Cheers.

 

[False Messiah]

I was disappointed. I walked into this blindly expecting something like "The Stanley Parable" as it was advertised something along "from the creator of..." on Steam's storepage. I know the fault, in the end, is mine and mine alone and if I don't get a refund from this then I will take this as a 'damage done, lesson learned' scenario for future purchase.

Don't get me wrong, the game was functional but it was not what I believed it was or wanted.

Cheers.

I can understand that if you're going in expecting a new SP you would've been disappointed. I tried to go in without any expectations after reading the steam store page and still felt a little let down.

It feels like the game is placing pieces of lore in the same way FNAF did, hoping that the community will try and fill in the blanks. I've seen a lot of good theories popping up, and I think this is the goal of the game.

I do hope that Koda will patch the FPS part so I can reload though...

 

[freaper]

Call me naieve, but I don't really understand if Coda was real or not or the author's stand in. If he wasn't real then it completely ruins the game experience, being an easy to relate figure (the suffering and enclosed artist) and creating false feelings towards. If it was the author's stand in it makes all the description about the games being deep completely hypocritical and false, and just being 90 minutes game about how awesome he thinks he is.

(My perspective, prepare your grain of salt) But see, it doesn't matter whether Coda, or even Davey's character were real. You felt honestly connected to them, I know I did -mainly to Coda-, so does it matter if they were real? Entertainment will make you feel stuff, but you know very well a lot of it is fiction. So why not have a stand-in simulate doubts that a creator might have? In fact, Coda's version we see (before the end) is just the version Davey wants to show us, so not even the "real" "Coda" (which is a technical term for epilogue).

Games, books, music, film, etc. can never mirror 100% what the author was feeling at the time, moreover, the author might purposefully omit information or lie about the story. You have to build your interpretation around that doubt, which is why Coda's games appealed to me so much: the meaning, seemingly, exists only in the receiver's mind, and at that point you can do whatever you want.

I might play this game a second time in the future, it was an experience, that's for sure.

EDIT: It's not because the narrator was holding you by the hand the entire time that you're not allowed to raise an eyebrow at the things they say (The Stanley Parable says hi).

EDIT2: I'm in agreement with pretty much everything the author of [a href=http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/10/01/wot-i-think-the-beginners-guide/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rockpapershotgun%2Fsteam+%28Rock%2C+Paper%2C+Shotgun%3A+Steam+RSS%29]this[/a] article wrote, final criticism and praise included.

 

[Lil_Rimmy]

Not gonna lie, this felt 100% like pretentious crap. I kinda get what the creator was trying to show by the end of it but there remains two points that just make me dismiss the game:
First, if Coda and the whole story around that was real, then that's interesting. However, it's interesting for about five seconds until you realize it's basically just two people who lack communication skills and prefer to converse in games so edgey your mum will tell you not to run around with them. If it wasn't real, then the whole game is literally just the creator going "HEY LOOK I MADE SUPER DEEP GAMES GUYS HEY! LOOK HOW DEEP I AM!"

Second, lets say I didn't care about all the other niggles and awful parts, and just focus on the message this game was trying to send. Yes, I'm doing the normally unthinkable and forgiving everything because it had an arty message. Let's say Coda was real or a different entity. Is the moral not to judge someone on their work, not to think you know everything about them, not to do things against their will even if you are trying to help? But if Coda isn't real, then it makes literally no bloody sense as the same person who made the games and hid them then later revealed them in order to feel good and then broke up with himself and stopped making them. The fuck kind of moral is going on there?!

I dunno. I was intrigued at first because I thought Coda was actually real. That would make a very interesting game, looking through a famous developers early projects and connecting them all up to the latest game. But it's not, it's just made up. The reason I loved the Stanley Parable was that it was an interactive game with great humor and interesting secrets and puzzles. This was not even Gone Home levels of boring (personally I didn't mind Gone Home despite at first glance it being a horror, as you actually interacted and looked into a story. It wasn't great, or even "good", but it was ok. Dear Esther, on the other hand, can go suck a fat one.), it was very much a walking simulator. Yes, the creator even brings that up in the game, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still a bloody walking simulator.

After watching the whole game, at the end I just wanted my hour and a half back.

 

[freaper]

Really, that's how I feel more and more about the game, Manipulation: a mockumentary. From referring to you personally to lull you into trusting the narration, to constantly keeping you busy by different games while brainwashing you into thinking of them more deep than they actually are while using an easy and cheap way of making you feel a connection with an unreal person. The narration is just enough to (ironically) never give you enough time to think about what being said and then criticizing you for thinking a game where a person kills himself should be seen as a call for help.

See, that's the genius thing about literature (or any other narrative medium)! The language the narrator uses is [em]so[/em] close to what we perceive as "a person crying out in distress" that we empathize really easily with both Coda and Davey, while it's obvious, from the second you clicked "add to cart" on Steam, that this experiences was going to be bound to your monitor, and any meaning you extract from that is entirely in your head, your "fault", so to speak.

But Coda, as he was presented, could be said to be an easy play on gamers' feeling, who didn't ever want put a game only to give up half way there or be afraid from reception? who didn't feel like society could not understand him and got enclosed in himeself? if he really was not real it's way too manipulative to be accepted.

That's you projecting meaning onto it; I had a different interpretation that was more intimately bound to my troubles, and neither of these interpretations are necessarily wrong. The only manipulation the developer (not the narrator) uses is that of, arguably, clever level design and storytelling. If you decided to jump on board the narrator's story about "a friend who makes weird games", that's again up to you. If anything, this game teaches you to be more critical of the narrator, the God of the game.

Being upset that the developer "tricked" you in feeling sympathetic should be enough proof that they at least succeeded in making art. Whether you like their art is something else.

 

[Kingjackl]

I was a bit let down by this one. There were too many people insisting on going into it blind, assuming it would have the same profound impact on others that it did for them. As it stands, I'm not really a creative type, so it fell kind of flat for me.

I will say, I respect it for what it does and I'm happy there are people coming away from it feeling like their lives have been seriously enriched. It just isn't for me, and this is someone who loved The Stanley Parable.

 

[zerragonoss]

I found it very moving as a story of a failed friendship not simply as something for creative types. The message I got out of it is about the interpretation of games and the interpretation of other people and who much this can be influenced by your own state of mind. To me the most meaningful line where one ?if only somebody told me he just liked making prison levels this all could have been avoided? showing that maybe coda was never depressed and Davey was just reading too much into it. Second when he said something along the lines of I cannot imagine not careening about validation don?t remember the exact line, which showed that he was projecting himself onto coda?s games. You can see this further in the tower level where coda leaves him a message telling Davey to stop putting lamp posts into his level, Davey thought games with end points were better, whereas coda did not. Davey wanted to show coda ?growing? to agree with him.

 

[Callate]

It was interesting, and I think worth the $8 I paid for it, but it began to feel more than a little contrived by the end. I spent a little time going "Huh. Is this for real?" before resolving no, it couldn't possibly be- the way the later, allegedly self-contained games explicitly reference choices made in earlier ones, the intended emotional build that one might see in a real-time commentary but never in a self-enclosed, edited and proofread narration (unless it was scripted from the outset with that intention)... And that got to be distracting. There are few things less helpful for a sincerely-held sentiment than having to wrestle with how its proclaimer is being duplicitous or manipulative. The revelation about the lamp posts, for example- is simultaneously intriguing and at the same time caused bells to go off in my head, saying "There is no way the narrator would have offered this work in this form along with a message that clearly reveals something he said earlier to be a lie. That is the contrivance of a scripted narrative."

Like I say, distracting.

But the musings on what a game is or should be for its creator versus how it is consumed and interpreted by its audience- that was definitely interesting, and as others have said, something to ponder after the game is completed.

 

[Totenkreuz]

I believe that whatever a game has to say it should be restricted to the game itself. For me I don't see a point in being vague or make, in this case, a player do something as a PLAYER and not a CHARACTER. But ofcourse, whatever I say isn't what should be taken as some rule or law, this is just my own personal philosophy around how games should perform.

What does such a thing really accomplish? Maybe I'm not looking in the right places but making the player uncertain or confused about what he just experienced in a game and not giving him the tools to solve it, to lay it to rest, is a bad way to tell a story?

I can understand that if you're going in expecting a new SP you would've been disappointed. I tried to go in without any expectations after reading the steam store page and still felt a little let down.

It feels like the game is placing pieces of lore in the same way FNAF did, hoping that the community will try and fill in the blanks. I've seen a lot of good theories popping up, and I think this is the goal of the game.

I do hope that Koda will patch the FPS part so I can reload though...

Could you explain what "FNAF" is? Did it do something like "The Beginners Guide"? I don't really know much about these kinda games for reasons explained above. Ohh and that joke at the end was kinda funny.

Lastly, I got a refund for "The Beginners Guide", even when, on Steam's refund site it said I had played it for 2 hours!

Cheers.

 

[chocolate pickles]

Same crap as the Stanley Parable, only even more boring. Glad i got a refund while i could.

 

[Callate]

Could you explain what "FNAF" is? Did it do something like "The Beginners Guide"? I don't really know much about these kinda games for reasons explained above. Ohh and that joke at the end was kinda funny.

"FNAF" is "Five Nights at Freddy's", a horror game series that has attracted attention through a combination of tense, jump-scare filled game play and much-discussed hints of a partially obscured over-arcing history and timeline/storyline.

The latter being where the comparison is made, presumably- the idea that just enough is revealed for there to be something to talk about, but enough is obscured so that wildly different interpretations of the lore could be made.