But I mainly recommend The Beginner's Guide for the experience of playing an experiment-a conceptually adventurous way to tell a story that doesn’t really succeed, but is enjoyable for its commitment to being new. That’s what I took away, and while it’s heavy-handed, Wreden’s candidness is really appealing at times. I don't really mind the musing, and when I ignore some of the plot turns and obvious metaphors, I appreciate how The Beginner’s Guide expresses the impossible frustration of trying to understand depression in ourselves and others, and the errors we commit in trying to ‘fix’ it. It’s the album after the breakout album that's all about how hard it is to make more songs that everyone likes. If the latter is what you take away, I doubt you’ll like it much, because then it’s just another artist who follows up a hit with musings on the creative process. It can be about depression and isolation, how art and fear are inextricable, the debate over authorial intention, how we compromise our work for external validation, or, at the very surface, the pressure Wreden felt to deliver another hit game after The Stanley Parable. And there's plenty to talk about, because even though it’s not at all subtle about its themes, there’s such a great jumble of them that they can be puzzled together into plenty of interpretations. I like that the levels are ugly-they bring me back to my own experiments with Source's Hammer editor.īut The Beginner’s Guide doesn’t indulge for long, ending before I could start feeling too nostalgic for its beginning, and before its melodrama became unendurable. I thought of my own folders of false starts and documents called ‘story.txt’ and ‘test.png.’ Coda wants you to shut the hell up so he can make games. The first few games are convincingly the plain work of a beginner, but Wreden finds exciting creativity and mystery in each as he tries to decode Coda’s thoughts. Davey Wreden HAS to read every email, and you're dumping your on him. It’s like a documentary, but it feels illicit-we’re experiencing someone’s personal projects, a collection that was never meant to be shared.
That’s the first quirk: Wreden is talking to us, not to a character. In The Beginner’s Guide, Wreden, as himself, narrates a tour of experimental Source engine games ostensibly made by his friend, Coda. The only thing the two games really share (aside from being the sort of 'not a game' games that draw so much ire) is an unconventional narrator. I like that Wreden is sincerely exploring his own creative struggles, and I especially like that he’s made something even more peculiar than The Stanley Parable, even if it isn’t nearly as successful. It’s a very personal expression-a diary, almost-which some in the Steam reviews interpret as self-absorption (or, more bluntly, “San Francisco hipster bullshit”).
0 kommentar(er)
