 Day 12, The Beginner's Guide, suggested a whole bunch of times by Zenethrium and others before it finally crushed the competition being seconded by 30 people. The weirdest thing for me about The Beginner's Guide is that anyone ever thought it was true. Even outside of the controversy with the parent side of my former critical outlet, looking back on contemporaneous coverage, a lot of people were hedging their bets, saying it probably wasn't real, but also maybe. And that's ridiculous. Not just because the whole thing fits too neatly into a thematic narrative or because the narrator is clearly acting and not very good at it, but because the game would be a whole lot less interesting if it were literally true. The Beginner's Guide is an 80-ish minute interactive experience created and narrated by Davey Reedin, one of the minds behind Indie Darling, The Stanley Parable. But even if he didn't introduce himself so explicitly, you'd know. The Stanley Parable is just one of those games that hit the zeitgeist and everyone who pays even the slightest attention to the indie scene is at least aware of and probably understands the meaning of. Its deconstruction of player agency was hugely influential and impactful. Like the game inevitably changes the way you think about video game scripting and the illusion of choice. And it does this by having a man constantly buzz in your ear about fucking everything. What you're supposed to be doing, or perhaps what you are doing, which is really what you're supposed to be doing, it's a good game. I booted it up for the first time since 2013 while working on this, granting me an achievement graciously gifted to those who go five years without playing. I still enjoyed myself. Kevin Brighting has a lovely voice that makes being stuck in the world a lot more bearable. Reedin doesn't. But we've got to listen to him anyway as he spins a yarn about Kota, a game designer whose work has been hidden from the public because, quite frankly, he doesn't want it to be seen. So the story goes, between 2008 and 2011 Kota made a number of interesting little games using Valve's source engine that were never released but were shared for whatever reason with Reedin. After 2011 Kota stopped designing games or at least clueing Reedin into his creations. And after a few years of silence, Reedin decided to compile these experiences into the beginner's guide in the hopes of maybe convincing Kota to come back into his life. These unreleased works are presented one after the other in order of their creation. As a way of showing both Kota's progression as a designer and, more relevantly here, Reedin's growing obsession with Kota's designs. They last anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes and are presented in various states of completion. Some are unfinished. Some are finished from a design perspective but are impossible to complete. Some others are finished and can be completed but none of them has what you could call a traditional narrative. Sometimes the meaning is still fairly obvious while others are deeply abstract but there is always room to interpret the art, how you see it, or there would be if Reedin weren't constantly telling you his interpretation of things. And this is why the beginner's guide must be fictional because if it's not then it's like being on a first date with a man sporting a chin strap fedora combo. It's some douchebag talking about this cool thing that only he knows about but instead of letting you actually experience it, he constantly interrupts to tell you what he thinks and therefore what you should think and blah blah blah. If Kota is real then the fact that Reedin made this whole thing about himself is so much grosser. He's just a narcissist using someone else's work that was presumably repurposed without permission to self-flagellate for an adoring public that paid up to $9.99 plus tax. But if it's all him, if Kota is a construction that he is using for plausibly deniable self-flagellation before an adoring public that paid up to $9.99 plus tax, that is interesting. That is playing 4D chess with monopoly pieces. I like it when people commit to the bit and I can't think of many harder commitments than creating a game that is littered with hundreds of notes that a player can read that it claims were left by other players despite having no system by which players could actually leave notes and so clearly came from the creator himself but many of which are antagonistic towards said creator and then taking that whole thing, pretending it was made by someone else and narrating over a player's experience of it to say that none of what you're reading matters. That is fucking wild and I love it. Yeah, it's pretentious as hell but pretension is only a bad thing when it's boring. And this shit ain't boring. There is no time to get bored because every couple of minutes you are thrust into a completely new experience and like not all of them clicked with me but that's okay. Friends throwing spaghetti at a wall, some of it is bound to stick and though it's all presented through the lens of a game designer talking about someone else's game design, the ideas are far more universal. The effects of isolation, the futility of trying to truly know another person, the double edged sword that is creativity and creation. It gets pretty heavy and maybe a bit heavy-handed but as someone who wouldn't be talking about the game if it were not for a ridiculous attempt to jumpstart a creative drive that over the last year has just kept on slowing down, the moment where I was faced with a literal creative engine and had to try to convince it to start back up again, well that hit real fucking hard. 8.5 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammering Marko, Kat Sarkata, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I Am The Sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindyce, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video that is great if not oh well. If you want to see more you can suggest what I'll do in three days in the comments so do that. Nice.