The Beginner's Guide was announced like 2 days before it was released, nobody knew what it was, plenty of people played it, went "Huh", and then talked about what the author at Destructoid hints at.
The game is more or less structured like this:
- The Beginner's Guide is actually presented as the creator of The Stanley Parable (Davey Wreden) talking about a friend (I think his name was Coda) of his who made unique games through the Source Engine.
- The game presents itself as Davey showing off the games his friend made and analyzes them. Sort of like how his games reflected what type of person he was.
- The game then shows his friend Coda took a dark turn, started to make fewer games, and the games he did make became more depressing and overall unpleasant.
- The twist is most of this story is made up by Davey. There wasn't an interconnecting story or theme between Coda's games. He wasn't reaching out for help and he wasn't a tortured soul (at least how Davey pictures him). Instead Coda was mainly sick of Davey. In fact it's revealed that Davey changed his games to help make his case. (Like the main example is he added lamp posts at the end of all of Coda's games to help connect all of his games together as a collected work of sorts)
- This is all revealed in Coda's last game where he basically tells Davey to "Fuck off. Leave me alone" in video game format. Davey reflects on what he did. The game ends.
That's not 100% of the story in The Beginner's Guide, but that's just to give you an idea.
So when people finished it, especially right after it came out, people thought either:
- This is a work of fiction. There was no Coda. The levels Coda made were actually made by Davey. All of this was made up. This was just a way for Davey to tell a really particular story, and one of the characters happened to be a fictionalized version of himself. (Of course, people are free to like or dislike The Beginner's Guide or think if this type of game worked for them. Speaking for myself, I really liked how the story was told and how everything unfolded.)
- This is a work of nonfiction. In that case, the tension between Coda and Davey is real. Davey decided to escalate things and try to reach out to him by basically taking all of Coda's work, bundled it up together, and put it on Steam. Meaning he basically stole somebody's finished, unfinished, and working prototypes of games (that were never intended to be sold), profited financially from it, all so he can do the video game designer equivalent of "Coda?! Why won't you call me back man?! Do you see what I'm willing to do to talk with you?! Come on man, DON'T DO THIS TO ME!!!" And of course, he is the creator of The Stanley Parable, so if this feud was real, Davey would have brought it out in front of thousands and thousands of people with all of the major gaming news outlets talking about what's going down. (Not cool, man)
In other words, if it's fictional, it is a unique and interesting personal story (especially if you look at what he went through after the success of The Stanley Parable). If it is nonfiction...then Davey is kind of a horrible person. I think most people just asked a somebody "Hey, is this real" or pulled up Google and searched for "Coda" to see if anything came up. When you see if from beginning to end I think it is pretty clear this was all fiction.
So that's what Desctrutoid was talking about.
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