The Beginner's Guide

This game is beautiful. It has a coherent plot even though the environment sometimes doesn't make sense. I love how the game reveals things to you and leaves a mystery with you. 10/10 wish I could replay for the first time.

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the narrator's voice...cant listen to it for hours game is way too slow waste of time

我相信你玩完后会有自己的感悟

First off, I have never played The Stanley Parable, and I don't think I ever will. Secondly, the game crashes on my PC as soon as I launch it, apparently due to how many cores my CPU has or something. So I played it entirely on Steam Deck with mouse and keyboard. Something about The Beginner's Guide speaks to me. I don't know if it's because I'm an amateur dev myself, or because I just generally connect to it's themes and ideas. The disparity in the narrative to pit intrinsic and extrinsic motivation against each other is the analysis that I keep returning to this game for. I've watched multiple playthroughs on Youtube from multiple people, though, actually playing the game, I couldn't help but feel disconnected for some reason. But maybe that's a problem with me, and how I've somehow made this entire review about myself. Anyways, I find this game to be interesting to think about.

I went into this hoping to understand the creative process or an introspection on the nature of creating, and while it seemed like it was going to be that at first, it turned out to be the, quite frankly, ramblings of someone who massively overstepped and couldn't figure that out. If it's an analogy for something, and I'm too dense to see that, then egg on my face, but If it's a real story then, geez dude... So why recommend it? -it's cheap and quick, and you, as others have, might glean something of philosophical or otherwise value from it. -It's not lazily made or anything, just narratively jarring. I can't not recommend a game where a subjective creative decision I "didn't get" is the main reason. Much like another reviewer said, I'd give it a lukewarm "ehh" if I could, but overall, while I thought it was an uncomfortable experience, it was an experience I remember, so sure right?