
The Beginner's Guide is a narrative video game from Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable. It lasts about an hour and a half and has no traditional mechanics, no goals or objectives. Instead, it tells the story of a person struggling to deal with something they do not understand.
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
Prices
Each in the currency that store quoted — not converted: the gap between two rows is the publisher's pricing, not an exchange rate.
Every market we collect.
Discounts
Every price cut of more than 20% we have observed, in each market that quoted one, with this game's chart position on either side of it. These are episodes, not a model: a sale is one event, and one event cannot tell you what the next one will do.
Reviews, worldwide (the counter carries no country): 2.57/day in the week to Aug 10 → 15/day in the week after.
For scale, across Steam · Top Sellers · Brazil over the last 30 days: the 23 chart moves that followed a price cut of more than 20% went a median of 14 places towards #1, and the 2,515 moves with no price cut behind them went 2 away. One store, one chart, one country — it is the only place we have enough observations to say even that.
Prices outside the United States have been collected since 6 August 2026 and chart positions since 19 July 2026, so a cut older than that has no market to compare and a market that joined later has no history yet. Nothing here is converted between currencies.
About
Genres
Updates
Build ids and update times come straight from Steam's PICS — the same source SteamDB reads. Patch history grows as we record new builds.
Engagement
Reviews
Themes across 1074 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
The beginning was intriguing, the story brings up a lot of interesting points on art as a whole. But the last few chapters is just cringy whining to me. The whole game is like a personal message you were never meant to see, it tries to be emotional, but you don't empathize with it at all. It's supposed to be an appology, but it's a poor one, because, 1 - the whole drama is sucked out of thin air, and 2 - the narrator (the author) is in the wrong and he admits it.
Went in completely blind 10/10 highly recommend!
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Price dynamics, follower growth, revenue and sales trajectories with interactive tooltips
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Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English*, French, German, Spanish - Spain, Russian*languages with full audio support
Hours played at review time, across 1.1K reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Nice
sanat tasarımı güzel ayrıca liminal space etkiside var
I don't even know what to say, I don't know how I was supposed to feel. This isn't a game, it isn't an art project, it isn't a clever commentary it's a story, a story about two people, just people, a story about unsolicited help, a story about depression and burnout. I don't know if I was supposed to play it, or if anyone was.
excellent short game
Very indepth story that takes about 1 and a half hours to play through. Much to learn about the characters. Well made game. The game runs very well.
Эта игра хороший мета комментарий на тему создания творчества и его принятия. Структура и тип повествования максимально просты, но при этом очень хорошо обыграны и обставлены, что вызывает интерес и показывает мастерство автора в подаче истории (ну это и так было понятно после The Stanley Parable). Отдельную похвалу заслуживают локации: они простые, но по полной используют функционал и особенности движка Source. Из-за этого локации выглядят максимально абстрактно и лиминально (я считаю, что именно движок Source породил Backrooms и само понятие лиминальности пространства). Больше всего мне нравится в игре её двоякость повествования и множество тем, которые она поднимает. Одним словом, эта игра - учебник, который рассказывает, как понимать и принимать искусство, и показывает, что оно может быть разным, даже невидимым человеческому глазу. В конце концов, может, Кода просто любил писать алгоритмы и логику игр, а не их создание, этого мы никогда не узнаем.
More people should know about this game! it's worth the money a thousand times over, it's a rare case when a game is very short and you know the story is a separate diamond especially when you put the end and the beginning.
This game hit me differently to almost anything I've ever played. It was slow and methodical and entirely captivating. It's essentially a walking sim, but the narrative is very engaging and interesting. I finished it in one sitting because I was unable to stop playing. It's best to not read much about this game. Go in blind and give it 10 minutes and you'll probably feel it grab you too.
Players by region
Where this game's players are, estimated from review languages.
Players also reviewed
The games this title's players most often review too — audience affinity.
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