The Beginner’s Guide is a walking simulator with a narrator from the creator of The Stanley Parable. On the game’s Steam store page it says “…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.” This made it sound interesting, especially as it was The Stanley Parable guy. This was the most boring game I’ve ever played.

You do just walk in this game, sometimes forwards , sometimes backwards and there are a few things that you have to interact with but not much. The narrator just talks to you, his speech isn’t humorous or dynamic, he just expresses some of his thoughts as you keep pushing on waiting for something to make the game feel worth playing. You never find anything worth playing.

Why bad and not terrible then? Because the narrator did have interesting things to say and if this was a documentary on TV with no player interaction this could be great. The levels themselves are projects that someone called Coda was working on and the narrator shares his interpretations of the meanings of the games and analyses his friend’s state of mind all the way through. Eventually the narrator realises some things and Coda is direct in what he’s trying to say. I honestly don’t know how factual this game is or if it is all made up.

The message that I took from this game is that we can analyse people as much as we want but we should always be careful of how we act, even if our actions are well intentioned they could be wrong.

If you have interest in thought processes and psychology or if you like sort of sad stories and fairly slow documentary type shows or even if you are the Coda who made the bits of games that are used in The Beginner’s Guide it may be worth a play. But as a gamer who has played many genre’s and doesn’t mind walking simulators I think that this is a bad game.