The Beginner’s Guide will probably either be loved or hated by many. I happened to love it. It’s difficult to describe exactly what it is and one thing I enjoyed was that you will find a great deal of theories on the story to it and all of them could be right or wrong. What the game basically boils down to is you get shown various short games made by “Coda” and get given backstory through narration by Davey Wreden, who is the developer of this game. Through it you learn of how Coda and he met and his interpretations of Coda’s games and life. What works wonderfully here is that, while I believe this is all a fictional story, you could easily believe that it is real. Davey Wreden does a great job at the narration and without that the game would fall apart. The game play itself is pretty simple. Some parts are walking simulator; some are light puzzles; but really the goal is just to learn more about Coda. The game’s themselves are nothing amazing, if these were actually released games I doubt anybody would praise them but as it is they simply serve as a back story and a way to further the plot. I don’t want to comment on the graphics too much because these games are supposed to be Source engine games made by a single person so graphics isn’t the point. The music is fairly well done though.
I played The Beginner’s Guide on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches. You can’t manually save, the game saves at the start of each chapter but they’re pretty short chapters. Alt-Tab works. There are four AA settings; six AF settings; a v-sync toggle; and four other graphics options. The game ran great, often times at 144 FPS with a few drops but even then was well above 60 FPS.
Game Engine: Source
Disk Space Used: 3.32 GB
Input Used: Keyboard and mouse
Game Settings Used: 8x AA; 16x AF; v-sync on; multi core rendering on; all highest
GPU Usage: 19-98 %
VRAM Usage: 1006-1233 MB
CPU Usage: 5-20 %
RAM Usage: 3.8-4.8 GB
Frame Rate: 74-144 FPS
You can get a lot out of the story to A Beginner’s Guide depending on how you look at it. It can be a tale of depression; misunderstood creativity; friendship; the struggles of indy game development; I even have a theory involving stalking. At the end of the day all and/or none of these could be correct. That’s the beauty of the game in my eyes. In any case it’s an interesting way to spend eighty seven minutes and is well worth it’s current $10.99 CAD price.
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 22.0.1 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Garuda Soaring White-tailed-eagle | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.17.1-zen1-1-zen | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz