*you can barely see my face behind a big book labelled "zingers"*

art game for people who are marginally into source engine speedrunning.. mneh.. *i tear out a page, crumble it up and toss it behind me*

game made by someone who has played every FPS.. nonono.. game made by someone who has played no FPS before ever... nah... bleh.. cruelty squad if it was in my backyard? is that something? *tapping my chin*

AHA! *takes out comically large feather pen and writes "spiders are scary dawg😂 i peed"*

The Beginner's Guide is difficult to write a spoiler-free review on; trying to do so has you encounter similar problems as writing about e.g. the movie Shutter Island post-viewing, where a story-element introduced late into the piece recontextualises everything that came beforehand- Meaning that, to talk about it carefully, you have to reset your mind to a state prior to having seen this critical element; effectively pretend to be someone else.

And that really is the crux of it - in small but ultimately important ways, my life can be divided into an era before and after I played The Beginner's Guide.
I can't turn back time, and I can't stop being me. So I'll change approach:

Clocking in at around an hour and a half of playtime, its story brings up existentially uncomfortable questions relating to patterns of interpersonal relations and one's relationship to creativity. It also reinforces all of these questions with several iron shutters of metatextuality that caused games journalism as a whole to have a collective panic attack: "Does this game even want to be talked about?" "Does it want to be interpreted?" My answer is a resounding Yes, and the cowardice with which people in 2015 approached it showed a lack of experience with meta-fiction outside of video games that was pitiful.

As a writer, I believe that metatextuality is a great tool for talking about what you are doing with your story, and even allows you to better examine yourself while also pretending not to be yourself. A lot of games journalists back in the day felt that the metatext of The Beginner's Guide made it "cold", and hard to approach. I think the opposite; its metatextuality belies a vulnerability and a self-reflexiveness/self-reflection we don't often get in games - and that alone is worthwhile.

The story told in The Beginner's Guide has a lot to offer if you are somebody who is willing or able to self-reflect, and to admit that you were wrong. An ability to tell fiction from reality is also important, as knowing that the game's occurrences are fictional is crucial to meeting it halfway.

As for the half-star deducted:
1. Some replay value to see some small different outcomes is there, yes, but overall there isn't much a player can do in its playspace.
2. The Source Engine really hasn't aged particularly well from a technical standpoint. You'll see the message Node Graph out of date. Rebuilding... accompanied by stutters very frequently.

The endless nightmare of suburbia sprawls out in front of you. There is no end to Sloppy Eater. Even after acquiring the meat that you came to the store for, the endless nature of the consumerist hellscape we have constructed for ourselves continues to repeat itself.

Sure, you may buy the food you need from the store. But you always return. It will always be, in some ways, a socially draining experience. You constantly need to find some way to combat the thoughts and anxieties racing through your head, because they will continue to pile up and crush you. The horrors of the mundane see you as fundamentally different. You get looks and strange remarks thrown at you.

You are fundamentally othered for who you are. Being a trans woman is like being a vampire in a supermarket. It's an arresting and isolating experience. We are judged by all who would be our peers.