“EST. TIME TO READ: 2.5 TO 9 YEARS”

Before I moved to Portland – maybe 2016 – my friend Collin told me about this game he was playing, “The Beginner’s Guide,” over a Skype call.

“It’s by the guy who made the Stanley Parable,” he told me. And I was like, whoa, cool, that game owns. I love the Stanley Parable, I told him. Anyways he described the game to me briefly, said it was about a guy going through another guy’s games without his permission, which… now that I’ve finally played it, yeah, that’s basically what’s happening, but for the longest time I had this idea of the Beginner’s Guide in my head. I thought the game was about a thief, digging through games on somebody else’s computer. He wasn’t lying though.

Why I played the Beginner’s Guide now, nearly a decade after it was released, is because Jacob Geller posted a video where he briefly discussed the Beginner’s Guide, and I figured I might as well set aside an hour, play the game, and then watch the video in full.

Also, to whom it may concern, I think you owe it to yourself to play the Beginner’s Guide and watch Jacob Geller’s videos on Modern Art, and then his latest video (at the time of writing), “Art for No One”.

Although I make it a habit to mark spoiler-filled reviews, I’m leaving this review unmarked in the event you might read these opening paragraphs, and hope you might indulge yourself in this recommendation.

That said, I’ll put a bunch of big, bold-faced spoiler tags right here:

! SPOILERS AHEAD !

! SPOILERS AHEAD !

! SPOILERS AHEAD !

(Disclaimer: When I refer to Davey Wreden in this review, I am specifically referring to the character, not the person)

It’s also funny because my first thought as I started playing this, and during my playthrough, was “Hey, this guy sounds like Jacob Geller!” Funny enough, Jacob Geller wouldn’t post his first video essay until late 2018. So actually Wreden exists here as more of a proto-Geller, and Jacob his progeny.

A surface level reading of the Beginner’s Guide is that it’s a cautionary tale, one of alienation, of art vs. product, and how want of external validation can inadvertently poison one’s intentions, actions, etc.

Even without much heavy lifting I think a lot of people will enjoy the Beginner’s Guide for being a genuinely interesting and inspired story. I also think that some people will either fail to grasp (or deliberately misrepresent) this game’s ideas and write it off as pretentious, overly-philosophical, or whatever.

To me, games exist as multidimensional art. When people get onto Backloggd.com and write forty paragraphs about why Dark Souls is good because its friction challenges conventional action RPG mechanics, you’ll also end up with people that dislike Dark Souls because of that same friction. Such disparity between players exists because the experience can vary so significantly.

In that Dark Souls example, for instance, there’s like a hundred Fuck You moments in the Souls games that exist purely to spite the player. I think this is an undisputed truth. There are certain areas, levels, enemies, mechanics that players can’t and won’t fully grasp until they’ve been experienced firsthand – in layman’s terms, because they’re killed.

Dark Souls is a remarkable series of games because it was able to find any kind of audience at all. It’s a real chicken and the egg-type scenario. Was the collective gamer subconscious secretly vying for the masochistic dark fantasy kingdoms of Boletaria and Lordran? Or were the Souls games truly unique, steadfast arguments in and of themselves – independent of the then-zeitgeist – as games that sought to cultivate an audience instead of merely “finding” one? I tend towards the latter option, but I can’t deny that there must’ve been some real freaks out there waiting for a game like Dark Souls with bated breath.

Regardless, Dark Souls has an audience now. And that’s great! But it’s also kinda sad. On one hand, it’s awesome that such a striking, contentious game is able to receive universal acclaim and connect with so many people; on the other hand, this experience influences the mainstream, inspires imitators, and loses its individuality to the myriad clones it inadvertently spurred.

Now, I’ll save my unabridged thoughts on Dark Souls for another review, but that’s where I’d like to begin with the Beginner’s Guide.

It should go without saying that (like any game) Dark Souls is multidimensional art. The experience of playing Dark Souls is a game of unending struggle. The world is bleak, hostile, dying. Dark Souls has rudimentary, heavy combat. Enemies have long windups and telegraphs. Dark Souls is a labyrinth of puzzles and traps. I quit Dark Souls three times before I defeated the Taurus Demon, the game’s second boss.

Dark Souls is predicated on struggle and perseverance. I think that underlying “struggle” is what most people (myself included) will focus on when discussing Dark Souls. The struggle is – in so many words – “the point” of Dark Souls. You’re supposed to struggle. You’re supposed to die. You’re supposed to learn from your mistakes, strategize, reorient yourself, and triumph by any means necessary. That’s Dark Souls.

James Davenport’s PC Gamer article, “I beat Sekiro’s final boss with cheats and I feel fine” stands in harsh contrast to these romantic ideals. I remember reading the headline for the first time and just going, “Oh, no”. I was mortified. It was like watching somebody jump into a shark tank. A virtual suicide via angry mob.

Indeed, the response to this article was swift and brutal. Many users decried Davenport’s victory as illegitimate. Others scrutinized Davenport’s profession. These replies would spiral into juvenile insults, batshit insane post-Gamergate takes, and a new wave of aversion towards games journalism.

“You cheated not only the game, but yourself. You didn’t grow. You didn’t improve. You took a shortcut and gained nothing. You experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained. It’s sad you don’t know the difference.”

If you’ve played any of the Fromsoft Souls titles, I know it’s easy to get swept away by the game’s lofty ambitions and demanding difficulty, but dude, talking like this to people is weird as hell.

Maybe it’s partially because I’ve been in this guy’s situation before. I used cheats at the end of my first playthrough of FFVII to defeat the final boss. I only used cheats at the end of my first playthrough of FFVII to defeat the final boss. Yeah, I felt bad about it, but you know what else feels bad? Being stuck on the final boss of a 50+ hour game and putting your one and only save crystal at the very start of the final dungeon instead of the Point of No Return. I’d played and thoroughly enjoyed 99% of the game until then. I wasn’t going to let one mistake sour the end of my playthrough.

That’s the thing, too, because Davenport’s article mainly concerns the final boss, most people overlook that he’d already made it to the end without cheats. In fact, he spends a good amount of that article talking about all the bosses he’d enjoyed fighting up until that point.

It’s genuinely baffling. Like, in the context of a “game,” we’re not discussing football or chess, we’re talking about a single player action-adventure video game. This dude’s not hurting anybody. He cheated himself, and he knows it, but that’s not why he cheated – he cheated because was stuck on the final boss of a 30+ hour game and he was ready to be finished. He’s obviously not in it for the clout. He’s not under penalty of perjury or anything. He’s invested time and effort into a game, enjoyed himself, and the final boss – a notoriously difficult final boss – was a bridge too far. I get it.

The alternative would be a white flag. When a game’s difficulty exceeds any one player’s capabilities, we have to throw in the towel. This happened with me and the original Mega Man. Even with save states, I could not put a dent in the final level’s boss rush for the life of me.

Anyways, the Beginner’s Guide is not by any means a condemnation of players that use cheats and therefore bypass the intended meaning/experience of a game, but more of a meditation on art as personal expression (more than anything imo) versus art as a product.

It would also be very easy (and frankly, dismissive) to summarize the Beginner’s Guide as a criticism of players that overanalyze media. This is a very surface level reading of the story. I mean Wreden is about as subtle in his writing as a sledgehammer to the face. His friend’s name is literally Coda – as in “coder”. Like come on. If your only takeaway is that the Beginner’s Guide is “pretentious” or “postmodern” (may or may not be directly quoting another review I read here… who’s to say?) then I fear you’ve lost the plot.

Players take a literal machine gun to an engine that is representative of, in the game’s own words, Coda’s motivation to make games. It’s his inspiration, his drive. When Coda loses his motivation, when the engine “breaks,” Coda doesn’t attempt to repair it – he interrogates it. Treats the engine as an evildoer. A criminal.

Coda’s fixation on prisons is an especially noteworthy motif. In his series of “prison games,” as Wreden calls them, Coda creates a prison out of a house. The player begins in a comfortable, pleasant-looking room with furniture and amenities. The opposite wall reveals a well on a hillside, which is barred off. When the player proceeds, they eventually find themselves at the bottom of the well – on the other side of the bars, but still trapped.

This idea is explored in many of Coda’s games. In “The Great and Lovely Descent,” Coda traps players in a prison cell for a full, real-world hour (although Wreden allows players to bypass this hour-long waiting period). In “Nonsense in nearly every direction” (the Stairs level), the player climbs a set of stairs – but at the halfway point, their speed is reduced to almost zero. Wreden modifies the game to return the player’s speed to normal. In both instances, Coda expects players to wait an inordinate amount of time to progress. In both instances, however, there appears to be a continuation (or a “payoff”) to this waiting period. In the “prison games,” there’s no means to continue. Players remain trapped without escape.

Now, for all of the armchair analysis Wreden attempts (in regards to the “prison” aspect of Coda’s games), he only ever sees Coda as the one that’s trapped. Trapped in his own head. Trapped in his ways of thinking. Wreden says as much during the prison games level, affectionately titled “Pornstars Die Too”:

“There's nothing that's particularly interesting about it,” Wreden says, “it's kinda just weird for weirdness sake… Personally I think it's awful to watch this, to see a person basically unraveling through their work, and for what! At what point do you just go ‘Eh, maybe there are game ideas other than this prison that I could be working on’? But Coda doesn't have that voice telling you to stop, that particular mechanism of defense against yourself. Without it you just spiral.”

A few things I find interesting about what Wreden says here: firstly, the way he uses pronouns in this instance – instead of saying, “Coda doesn’t have that voice telling him to stop,” he says “Coda doesn’t have that voice telling you to stop,” switching between third and second-person. Although I know Wreden’s delivery here is informal, and oftentimes people (myself included) use “you” when illustrating examples in conversation and writing, I think it’s interesting because it implies Wreden is having a kind of “conversation” with the player and is not necessarily reading from a script, and also because he’s convinced that this is what’s happening to Coda as he’s making these games.

The way Wreden talks about Coda here also seems demeaning. Both because he is actively critiquing his friend’s work – work that the player understands was meant to be private, and originally not meant for Wreden – and also because he characterizes Coda as this meek, self-destructive character that frequently needs outside guidance. Players will notice this pattern in Wreden. He frequently breaks Coda’s games wide open to allow players to progress, calling attention to these sections and posturing his alterations to Coda’s games as improvements.

There’s also that title, “Pornstars Die Too”. What’s up with that? The title doesn’t seem to have any relation to the level itself. My interpretation is that it’s comparing porn to video games; alternatively, it’s comparing artists to pornstars; alternatively, neither, or both.

I think it’s specifically “pornstars” and not something like “rockstars” or “movie stars” because porn is comparatively understood as a product instead of “art”. Nobody’s making 40 minute video essays on why Deep Anal Abyss 4 is an underrated masterpiece. Porn exists very much as a product to be consumed unlike film or music. Especially now, in an internet age where an unfathomable volume of porn is widely available and redistributed (even against the wishes of its producers), how people consume porn has become a point of conversation. I know people who’ve never paid for porn in their life, actual filter feeders whose porn collections fit neatly into a bookmarks folder.

My friend Collin, who I mentioned at the start of this review, will sometimes open conversations with, “Hey man, you watch any good porn lately?” Which is like, bar none the funniest opener to a conversation imaginable. It’s always funny. And I never answer him. I laugh it off, or I ask him the same thing, or I pretend like I’m going to tell him about some porn I’d watched recently, but I never do. But honestly, what is there to discuss?

Well, uh, pornstars, for one. I’ll avoid talking about pornographic images, or drawn pornography, or 3D-rendered pornography; mainly because if we’re talking about actual porn with actual people in it, we’d mainly be discussing the actual people in it. People only ever talk about pornstars.

It’s weird though, because unlike rockstars or movie stars who oftentimes (inadvertently) inspire a cult of personality outside of their work, pornstars are often only viewed in relation to their work. You’ll see this happen with people who no longer work in the industry: their prior work is often denigrated, framed as a source of embarrassment, and subsequently this “invalidates” all future preoccupations or career paths. You’ll often hear something to the effect of, “If you wanted ________, you wouldn’t have done porn in the first place.”

It’s weird because there’s still a negative association with being an adult performer. It’s also weird because people can watch porn in private, keep a library of stolen porn on their computer, and not pay for any of it; but God forbid you’re a performer, because otherwise the people that’ve watched you, seen you naked, seen you contort into somebody else, will never let you forget it.

Pornstars die too.

Objectified in life and after death. Performers that give their bodies to be used as objects. Is that not – in a sense – some kind of art? Forgive me if that perspective is unbecoming. Maybe I’m thinking too much into this.

My point is that it’s a mostly thankless job. But I know that people produce porn for reasons besides the money. Some of my close friends are sex workers, even some that no longer produce content. I know that sex work can be pleasurable and cathartic, but it can also be awkward and messy… that comes with the territory.

Beyond the obvious heteronormative vanilla pornography, each individual’s predisposition towards certain kinks/fetish content will also determine a pornstar’s “niche”. Such content is comparable to “genres” of films, television shows, or even video games. For example, it’s understandable that a pornstar who makes the most money from BDSM content is likely to continue producing BDSM content; likewise, if a developer is known for releasing FPS games, they’d likely continue to release FPS games. There are plenty of exceptions to be made here – I’m sure you could even think of a few counterexamples. Your favorite developers have probably dipped their toes into more than one genre. What I’m saying is that if we’re speaking in pure economic terms, once you’ve found a niche, it’s safest to stick to it.

Relate this to how we perceive Coda through his work in this level. Every variation upon this prison of modern furniture. The second variation of this level, where players are given options as to how they desire to decorate the room, also does not account for the myriad options presented. For the last choice, one dialogue option reads “I’m pretty sure none of my choices are making any difference.” There’s a maze at the end that Wreden skips over.

So, much like Wreden, I’d like to bypass some of the game’s later levels – figuratively skipping over them – so that I can talk about the last few levels and their significance.

“Mobius Trip” aka the Game You Need to Play With Your Eyes Closed aka The One With the Giant Door is a farce. Obviously you can’t finish the game with your eyes closed. This is the first game where Coda explicitly admits that he doesn’t want to keep making games anymore.

“Island” is more of a conversation. Almost like listening to a prerecorded therapy session. The irony is that the conversation becomes explicitly one-sided towards the end, the disembodied voice that seemed to want to help the player instead has the player lie to themselves.

“When I make games I feel completely energized.”

“I am constantly excited and enthusiastic about my work.”

“It is easy, it never stops being easy.”

Whereas Mobius Trip feels like it’s about Coda coming to grips with his work and finally being honest with himself, “Island” feels like a response to that game. Even if Wreden believes this is Coda talking to himself, I think most players understand that the anxieties Coda expresses within “Island” are not unfounded. Although Werden interprets this game (and others) as a cry for help, I think this game’s purpose is to underline the disembodied voice’s instructions and intentions. The player is disempowered – as they are in all of Coda’s games – and are unable to speak their truth. They are forced to lie to themselves to satiate the voice’s demands, and so that the game will reach its conclusion.

Although it’s unclear if the game ends once the player finds the woman behind bars. The voice says “I’m free,” but the last thing we see is a prison.

And finally, of course, “Machine”. The one where you take a machine gun to an engine that is representative of Coda’s motivation to make games.

I think that “Machine” is a remarkable level. Certainly one of the more striking moments in the game. It’s also beating players over the head with its messages, so much so that Wreden’s line that “[he] really felt like [he’d] done something good, like [he] was a good person” as he explicitly outlines how he’d originally gone behind Coda’s and given his games to the public is really hammy in a way that’s a bit too unbelievable.

Can you believe that people were unsure if Coda was a real person when this game was first released in 2015? Like buddy, if you can’t tell if this game’s real or not by the end, I think you need to take a media literacy course at your local college or something.

The “Tower” is the real sendoff, a noticeably harsher, darker, more hostile level that seems to actively ward away potential players. Each puzzle is designed to be deliberately unfair, requiring outside knowledge of Coda’s previous games, or hidden messages between games, concluding with a section that is actually – literally – impossible to progress without cheating.

It’s in this level that we find Coda’s last message to Wreden, presented plainly, and in no uncertain terms:

“Dear Davey, thank you for your interest in my games. I need to ask you not to speak to me anymore.”

It’s honestly a little shocking. I’m not going to quote or paraphrase the whole thing because honestly that would kinda ruin the potency of it all. And I mean I’m assuming you’ve played the game anyways. Which if you haven’t, again, it’s literally an hour long game. You’ve got nothing to lose.

The game really says all it needs to say here. Everything afterwards including Wreden’s ensuing breakdown and the seventeenth level feel inconsequential. The story runs its natural course. We’re painted a full picture.

I think the game really needs to break its narrative logic to get across its point, that being that the reason Coda stopped talking to Wreden is because he was using and publicizing Coda’s work for his sake, and not for Coda’s sake. Coda didn’t want his work being publicized and made this boundary known, and Wreden going behind Coda’s back and altering his work and publicizing is a major breach of trust.

I’ve seen a lot of differing opinions and interpretations about the Beginner’s Guide, but a really weird perspective I’ve seen (citation needed) is that Coda is equally culpable for continuing to make games and sending them to Wreden knowing that he would misinterpret and/or alter and/or publicize them, which is (pardon my French) a very fucking stupid interpretation and I’m not even sure how you’d come up with that idea to begin with. As if any work needs to broadly encompass every possible outcome and interpretation of the work within itself so as to not be misinterpreted. Which is, uh, the point of the Beginner’s Guide, isn’t it? Like somehow people are reading too much into the story that is explicitly telling them that reading too much into work and assuming the artist’s intent/message is a bad idea.

News flash: not only is the game explicitly telling you it’s a bad idea, it’s also (somewhat paradoxically) inviting you to analyze Coda’s games alongside Wreden, because it wants you to sympathize with Wreden and it also wants you to understand that what he’s doing is wrong.

I also think that the final “puzzle,” that is the door puzzle at the end of “Tower,” which ends with the player needing to lock themselves in the dark – where Wreden has his breakdown – reads like a visual metaphor to me. This is Wreden’s point of no return. I feel like this scene reframes the Beginner’s Guide as Wreden’s journey overall. Although yes, the Beginner’s Guide exists as a game that we can play and experience, I do think that the epilogue retroactively calls the prior levels into question. As if this is Wreden’s final pass as he’s about to put his intentions into words, and once he finally locks himself in the final door puzzle, he realizes that he’s completely lost the plot. Coda’s gone and he won’t be forgiven.

Trying to generalize Coda and Wreden’s story misses the point. Anyone who pokes holes in a story and says “people don’t act like this/people don’t do this” are missing the point. In a vacuum, the Beginner’s Guide is a fable told through a series of Gmod maps. And I’d argue it works really well.

Although one aspect many people seem to get hung up on is Wreden’s need for external validation. It is indeed one of Wreden’s many character flaws, and arguably the most prominent.

Davey Wreden (the person and not the character this time!) posted an article shortly after the Stanley Parable’s standalone release about his depressive episode at the end of that year, when gaming news sites and content creators were busy putting together “Game of the Year” lists.

“The reality is that being given an award for your art is like being given the sun.” Wreden writes, “No matter how you dress it up, the gift is ultimately intangible, distant, trying to hold onto it will kill you.

And like, I know all of this, but for some reason I continue to viciously crave the validation I imagine each new GotY list might shower me in.

Like a drunk wandering from bar to bar looking for a fight, I am compelled by each new venue, each new possibility that THIS time a victory will temper the anxiety forever.

I am drinking to solve the problem of being an alcoholic.”

If you had no idea what the concept of “validation” even was, you might even assume it was some kind of addictive substance the way it’s described here. Nothing’s wrong with validation. But it’s the kind of validation Wreden describes, when his first major release became a runaway success, where I assume that validation becomes a deterrent against one’s own fears and anxieties.

And you could likely draw the same parallels from Wreden’s words here and the character he’s playing in the Beginner’s Guide. He tells us that he wants Coda’s games to succeed because A) he sees himself in Coda’s work, B) he feels good about himself when he sees himself in Coda’s work, and C) it makes him feel good when other people acknowledge that Coda’s work is good.

So, Wreden’s character makes sense. He goes against Coda’s wishes because he needs external validation and it costs him Coda’s friendship. That’s the entire game.

After watching Jacob Geller’s "Art for No One," however, I also think that Wreden’s most egregious crime in the Beginner’s Guide is his halfhearted eulogizing and pathologizing of Coda in general. Deliberately turning his games into a narrative of an artist losing himself to depression when that was never the case to begin with. I think Coda puts it best when he writes, “The fact that you think I am frustrated or broken says more about you than about me.”

The epilogue, to me, feels like Wreden deciding to make his own game – taking everything he’d loved from Coda’s games and creating something truly transformative.

To actually critique the game here, I believe there could’ve been a more fulfilling, concrete ending. It’s very much open-ended on purpose. But maybe there could’ve been a section where Wreden shows his own levels and explains his process, or maybe Coda could’ve appeared as a voiced character to give his side of the story. I don’t know. Totally spitballing here.

The Beginner’s Guide is a starkly minimalist game by design. Like Wreden’s previous game, the Stanley Parable, the narrator is basically the only voiced character. Stanley doesn’t have a voice because he’s the player analogue, arguably the perfect vessel for player expression. The narrator’s “goal” is to tell a complete story, and Stanley (the player) and their actions will often create friction if they contradict the narrator’s directions. This creates some fun interplay and seeing all of the endings of the Stanley Parable is a real treat. In the Beginner’s Guide, however, there are no alternate endings. If the Stanley Parable is a game about choices with numerous outcomes, the Beginner’s Guide is a game about being trapped, where the choices don’t matter because everything meaningful has already happened.

The Beginner’s Guide is a museum of one man’s mistakes, and as players we find ourselves complicit as Wreden invites us to theorize and pathologize Coda and his work. It is profoundly uncomfortable, by design.

And honestly at this point, there’s like ten different things I could touch upon, how this game interrogates us and how we interrogate art, how external validation becomes addicting, how Coda’s games can still be interpreted but without pathologizing its creator… however, instead, I think I want to return to Mega Man.

Mega Man was the last game I completely gave up on. And I was absolutely abusing the save state function before I quit. I’m not built for it.

When I was younger, I hated the idea of cheating. When I was a teenager I subsisted on an unhealthy diet of Call of Duty and Halo until Dark Souls rocked me out of my comfort zone. Dark Souls and its community imbued in me a sense of smug superiority over other players. After I’d finished Dark Souls, I felt like a champion. The mere achievement I wore like a badge of honor.

But it also drilled this idea into me that games always gave players the tools they needed to succeed. And I suppose that’s partially true, but not entirely. I think if I locked myself in a dark room in front of a 1980s CRT with a Nintendo Entertainment System and a copy of Mega Man, I could probably beat it (assuming I had reliable access to food, water, and a bathroom I guess). But it would take me a very, very long time. And at the end of it, I don’t think I’d like Mega Man very much.

I’ve started playing Super Mario Bros. 2 recently. I’m using save states frequently, usually after certain levels so that if I lose all my lives I don’t have to start over from the very beginning of the game.

In general, I think I’m just not a fan of older games’ tendency to punish players by sending them back to square one. Mega Man and Castlevania were at least lenient, giving you infinite retries and never resetting your progress to zero, but they’re still balls-to-the-wall difficult. And I’ve been playing a lot of older games and every time I use a save state I feel like I’m cheating myself.

I want to be a purist. I want to experience the game as it’s intended. But I’m also becoming exceedingly aware that my time on this earth is limited. There’s so many things I want to do. During Mega Man’s final level, I realized I didn’t want to keep playing it. So I didn’t.

When Wreden says that Coda originally had players stay in the prison cell for an hour before moving on, then adding, “If you don’t mind, I think we’re gonna skip that”. Players understand. We know why Wreden doesn’t want us to sit in a prison cell for an hour. It’s boring.

I don’t think the Beginner’s Guide is a condemnation of players going against the wishes of developers. I do, however, think it’s meant to have players examine their own preconceptions and biases in regards to games as multidimensional art, presented in-game as experiences that are purposefully unsatisfying, confining, and/or boring. Is the game better when you don’t have to wait in a prison cell for an hour? If this were a more traditional, straightforward narrative or action-driven game, maybe. But removing this section diminishes the experience as was intended by the developer. Wreden curates these games to be enjoyed as experiences, as part of a larger, interconnected story. In reality, Coda’s games aren’t comparable to similar games, not like Mega Man, or Castlevania, or Dark Souls, or Sekiro, or even the Stanley Parable, really. Coda’s games aren’t really games at all. They’re hardly cohesive experiences, let alone playable, oftentimes completely breaking down or confining players to inescapable prisons. It’s for this reason I don’t believe the game is providing commentary on how games ought to be experienced, because Coda’s games weren’t meant to be experienced by other people in the first place.

At the same time, I do think we’re meant to interpret Wreden’s modifications to Coda’s work as inherently transgressive. Not only because it distorts Coda’s original intentions, but because these games were never meant for the public. Wreden’s betrayal is so complete that it calls his entire character into question. In attempting to eulogize Coda, he slowly, unknowingly unravels. Wreden is laid bare. His praise was never in earnest. He only ever wanted to sell Coda’s story to an audience.

It was never his story to tell. It was never a story.

In summary, the Beginner’s Guide is metafictional reverse-revenge porn.

This is another game I won’t bother trying to assign an arbitrary score. Thank you for understanding.