The Beginner's Guide Reviews
As much as I didn't feel any profound level of resonance with the content of The Beginner's Guide, I will certainly defend its right to exist. I think that it makes a showing in a side of the industry that doesn't get a lot of attention, and that's a good thing. However, my personal opinion is that there are other games that do a far better job of making that showing, and this includes The Beginner's Guide's immediate predecessor.
[O]ne of the most emotionally alive games on the market
There's a heartfelt story here, but it's one you can watch just as easily as you can play. Try it.
The feeling of connection might be an illusion, though, and that tension is what gives The Beginner's Guide its strongest moments. Even as it reaches out from within its prisons, it won't let you forget the bars. If it is a desperate desire to be known and understood, then its intentions come fraught with the same doubts as any authentic relationship.
It's an unconventional game with interesting ideas—questions we don't ask often in games, mainly because most games aren't interested in this sort of dialog. We subsist mainly on a steady diet of summer blockbusters, and it's not often a weird art house game like The Beginner's Guide comes along, let alone gains any traction.
So did I enjoy it? Kind of. I think I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it, and then that appreciation was tinged with a wish that it could have been more. More clever, more surprising, more deep. But more importantly, it made me think, made me worry about people I care about, made me uncomfortable. And for that, I think, it deserves praise.
The second game from the creator of The Stanley Parable is an intensely personal character study and one of the most daring games in years.