The Beginner's Guide FULL NO COMMENTARY WALKTHROUGH GAMEPLAY "The Beginner's Guide Walkthrough"

Hey Nizzu, we're making a video on The Beginner's Guide, and would love to use some of your footage. Can we get your permission? We'll include links back to your channel. You can email us, tweet, DM, whatever! Thanks so much!

Im genuinely upset that Davey cut the Housekeeping game short. It was my favorite. If they added even more dialogue with the cleaning guy, I would play that game for hours.

i have to wonder who R is, and hope he’s doing alright. Davey could’ve created a different name to go by, but he didn’t. it all feels too true-to-life for it to be entirely fictional.

i love this game. truly tests the limits of what a video game is, and what it can be. this is the first and only time i’ve seen a letter of apology in video game format. it intrigues me to this day.

The Beginners Guide is truly a masterpiece.

There’s no other words to express the mystique of metanarrative game design.

What a waste of my time holy shit.

lmao just leave the guy alone man. this narrator is one of the worst kinds of people to be friends with

Upon rewatch, Davey is really an asshole through the entire thing

I can’t tell coda is real or not but if coda is real then I sure hope he found peace.

im unsure how to feel, but i love.. the simplicity of the people with boxes for heads. it’s so strange, they’d look great with suits

I feel like in interpreting what the story is really trying to say, we’re doing the same thing as Davey. We’re projecting a narrative onto something that isn’t. The story itself is a play.

I love the meaning of the maze at the end-- or of any of the locked doors and prison rooms that Davey forces the player past.
There are things about creators and artists that the audience isn't supposed to see, because its personal. Yet in an effort to understand the work better (or the artist better), we as the audience will endeavor to force ourselves past the boundaries and interpret the work from that new standpoint. Every time coda makes a closed room, a long wait, a restricted area with his own thoughts, Davey pushes into it and misses the point entirely. Davey interprets boundaries as a prison holding the creator back, when really they are a space of safety where the creator can enjoy their work without having the eyes of the world on them. Davey will never understand this, as validation is crucial to his existence, which is why as you float out of the engine room at the end you see an infinite maze-- he has looked past where he was supposed to, into Coda's life, and found that Coda's happiness and contentment is impossible for him to decipher.

This playthrough is something I come back to again and again. I'm an illustrator, and I often struggle with questions of why I make work and who I make it for. Usually its for myself-- I draw because its fun and relaxing and nice for me. I don't need validation-- in fact, I used to feel bad about even signing my name to my work. But then other times I feel pressure from the people who look at my artwork to draw more of a certain thing or market myself in a certain way. Or, because I illustrate happy things like children's books and comics with dragons and talking animals, people have sometimes come to the conclusion that I'm never serious, or all my interests are floaty and shallow. Its important to understand that while some artists choose to express their innermost feelings through their work, there are SO MANY of us that just make art because it feels warm and simple and safe. It doesn't have layers, its just something nice to look at. And trying to push beyond that to the artist's mind takes away that safe feeling.

Artsy fartsy bullshit jesus christ

Coda’s kind of an asshole really

I love listening to this while I clean, it allows me to replay the game in my head and to envision each of Davey’s emotions, his thought process, and how he interacts with the player through the game.
So much better than music :)

Glad I didn't pay a penny for this piece of shit. What a cheap-ass plot narrative it turned out to be. Wasted potential.

I abandoned the game after about 30 minutes because I thought it was extremely unenjoyable. Even the walkthrough was boring. This doesn't seem like a game at all - there's no gameplay or story, just a series of nonsensical and pretentious questions about video games.

I pretty much went through this when I could no longer reach out to one of my best friends out of respect for space. I respected this person more than anyone else... But this person didn't see praise and approval and treated as an equal as respect. It was to accept and encourage them as they are and their actions, even if it meant respecting their decision to distance themself and not want to find middleground.

It's kinda both ways though... He didn't respect codas space but coda didn't respect Daveyfor the time he put into getting to know them while they were friends. So it's kinda two sided disrespectful. It just hurts more for Davey because what he gets can't be repaired, where codas situation could with more communication. Davey will probably learn from this situation, but, how do you even start being able to get close to people if you also are infatuated with their work and how their brain works. That basically tells your heart that everything your passionate about can't include other people because they'll throw you out. Like, I know everyone is wired differently but, registering that the majority of people that left me in life were people that I connected with the most is effed up. People need more patience for mistakes, having any direct connection at all in some situations is extremely rare and I feel people take their company for granted.

Davey seems like a neurotic and controlling smartass but ultimately I think he speaks a lot of truth and isn’t a bad person. I feel like the comments mostly take Coda’s side but he honestly seems terribly insecure and mentally ill. It’s ultimately Coda’s fault for not making more games and no one else’s. If he didn’t like losing creative control he didn’t have to quit. He could’ve either kept it to himself or better yet get more than one person’s opinion. When you show your art to someone else it’s only natural they will miss interpret it, criticize it or give unwarranted advice, especially if they’re seriously engaging with your creations. I totally understand keeping art private and making it primarily for your own enjoyment, but I don’t think Coda is as free from external validation as Davy makes him out to be, in fact I think he’s much more insecure than Davy is. He lets Davy’s criticisms destroy his love of creating art and blames Davy for it when wasn’t obliged to listen in the first place. I have a feeling if Davy wasn’t in the picture Coda probably would’ve still gotten burned out just as quickly and maybe not even pushed himself as hard to make more elaborate and thought provoking games without Davy’s input.

I was 15 when I first watched this. I enjoyed it but couldn't truly understand at the time why. Now, 22, I understand more especially as an artist now. So many ways to interpret the game but its all, ultimately, meaningless...and that's ok. I'd love more to see this game, show them why videogames are art...but it's best not to force things. Things come to people when they do, and thats its. It's hard to describe, and you don't need too.

the island game 100% is about how he feels Davey felt about not having Coda’s games. and these games definitely went from “making something that interests me because it interests me” to “davey expects these all to mean something and hes putting a lot of unwanted toxic pressure on me and this is the best way i can think to tell him that”

This game is so underrated

This game ruined me. 10/10 would recommend. I wanna send this video to my therapist

I'm glad I didn't pay for this...

I always thought it was weird that davey included his email at the beginning of the game, and only now it’s hitting me that he probably did that so coda would know how to contact him if he one day saw this

You are given the tools to build.
You use those tools to create something with them.
You create something, and the only audience you have is you.
Are you trapped or free?

He made the ultimatie sacrifice. He went for the burn out, to let the game continue.

Did this game inspire the concepts of the backrooms?

This game seems to be literall to most, but for me I have never never felt so emotional from a video. I have never related on an emotional level to something so much, and I hate to admit it but I cried, and I don't cry much. Its sounds cheesy or stupid, but this game shoved truth in my face. You shouldn't pretend to know someone, you shouldn't pretend to know a situation, and you should check if your choices are for others or yourself. the end of the day, I really needed that message.

coda has autism

This is such a punishing narrative. To go through the whole experience trusting the narrator only for time to expose him as one with flaws and regrets, to learning that he is a massively broken individual who unknowingly destroyed someone's passion for his own benefit, and yet, you can't seem to hate the narrator. You only feel a deep sadness and existentialism for him. Sure, what the narrator did was horrible, but instead of just feeling disgusted and closing the game, you continue to play and feel for Davey, wanting to connect to him, seeing him in his full vulnerable self, someone who hates themselves so much, they objectively go against someone else's wishes in a hope to feel SOMETHING. Truly wonderful experience

Beyond self validation, one's life have a purpose, at the very least you want to have a purpose, you want your life to have goals, objectives, directions, destinations, messages, connections, doors to open, things to realize, etc. But all these are the manifestation of yourself, a being, a organique entity existing trying to know why it is existing. It is something that exist for a reason, not The reason, but A reason. I argue that reason is choosen by that being.

Only forever darkness awaits us, beings. For us existing and then not existing is in itself an absurde purpose, a purpose we did'nt choose, have not control on, that is completely unavoidable, permanent, and sadly so deeply real you want it not to be. We are struggling to our end trying to comprehend why do we end. Death talks. So much in fact that we invent reason to live, create things to feel like we have somewhat control or meaning. But I think we dont. We have nothing absolute. And I deeply think this is what is making it beautiful. Because without meaning, we can create one. We have the power to invent a relative meaning to our life.

Meaning of one's life : nothing absolute, only that one relative thing you might hold on to.

oughhhhh this is. i am. sobbing. dear lord i am sobbing.


spoilers//





ive gotta say there was this off feeling for me when davey started explaining how he met coda like a tiny crack that just kept growing and then when the ending hit. oh god. i see so much of myself in davey the narrator and it Hurts so much. also the way that ending recontextualises everything else in the game is BRILLIANT. the tower scene actually made me feel physically sick that i was watching this stream because it hit me how wrong it was that i was seeing it at all. incredible. this will live in my mind forever.

Cleaning Level = Outer Wilds?

The beginners guide really intrigues me as a game. In the most obvious way it comes through in the message, the “moral” present. It can be interpreted in many ways - don’t project, don’t force creativity, don’t force meanings. No matter if Davey is Coda, or other theories, this is minutia to the moral itself.

Another way the game interests me is in how it must be a game for the message to be portrayed effectively, I believe. This seems ironic watching a walkthrough of it, but even doing so you experience it as a game, not as a movie. The minor interaction keeps you invested, and Davey’s consistent filling the gaps - adding meaning where in truth there is none - works so well because the games in themselves are so empty, have such little to them. The games with the most meaning have the least narration, while Davey desperately tries to fill in the gaps in the games he talks most.

Another example is the housework game. I think of all the games, this is the one Davey ignores the significance of the most. It’s a warm, charming and sweet game, simple but endearing. It’s warm enough that some players of The Beginners Guide ask how to play the house keeping game on repeat forever. The fact Davey ignores this is important because it shows the depths of his projection - even adding a lamp post at the end, with no meaning to it, spoiling it.

The interpretations of others further interest me. How some people find the game carries nothing for them - claiming it has no arc, or that they know the message well enough already that it doesn’t work much on them. The game doesn’t work for everyone.

Equally I love how it feels equally long and short. An hour and a half isn’t long for a game at all, and yet so much of the game is arguably unnecessary. But it is oh-so necessary, to invest the player, to make sure they are in line with what Davey says until the revelation that he’s been saying nothing of meaning.

As an aspiring game developer, I love this. So many valuable messages. Creativity does not need to be constant. It does not need to be shared with others. It does not need to be good, or have a grand meaning, or any of that. If you love prison games, just keep making them.

This video does remind me of the Stanley Parable in that I don't trust the narrator at all.

It's a lot more subtle about it, though.

I know this vid is old but I still want to share my inetrpretation of teh door puzzle as I see it differently from Davey. I think the puzzle tells us that to move forward to the future we have to lock teh door behind us, if you always go/look back you wont move at all.

Well, this was deeper than expected.

He never did stop adding in those lamp posts

Coda took a “it’s not that deep bro” approach lmao