Davey Wreden's debut effort The Stanley Parable was vaguely autobiographical. While its whimsical tale of a narrator consistently butting heads with an unpredictable player character was funny, it also touched on more universal themes like the nature of free will, the void between thought and action, and the conflicting internal monologues that drive, confuse, and haphazardly guide us through life. It was heady stuff, but tackled in a cutesy package that primarily satirised conventional game design. Wreden's sophomore effort, The Beginner's Guide, dials down the humour, nixes the satire, and cranks the meta narrative up to 11 in one of gaming's most overtly autobiographical commercial projects.
Much like The Stanley Parable, The Beginner's Guide is a linear first-person game shorn of conventional mechanics like combat or puzzles (besides a single, relatively easy one early on). It also has a narrator commenting on your journey. That's where the similarities end.
This time out, the narrator isn't an enthusiastic Englishman, but rather Wreden playing himself. Wreden explains that he's here to show off the works of his friend, Coda, an enigmatic figure with a penchant for unique, experimental games. Coda is an odd duck, however, in that he never shows his games to anyone. He makes them, deletes them, then makes more. Wreden hypothesises that we can get to know this man through his work, so off we go cataloguing the digital scrapbook of this hermetic oddball.
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