The Beginner's Guide (2015)

I wasn't feeling very good and decided for whatever reason that I needed to play this game again. There are a lot of stressful things I've been going through lately, one of them being a sort of big elephant in the room but it's not as important as these other problems right now. Long standing more underlying things that have been boiling over to the surface in my own personal life that I felt reconnecting with this game might serve to do something about. It feels too pressing for me not to follow through right now. When I first played this game, I was throwing myself hard against the wall and struggling to make sense of what it all meant to be an artist, really. It is such a simple question with a simple answer: artists make art. Duh. But it's never that simple.

It's never good feeling unfulfilled as a creative, and the insidious thing about it is that sometimes your experience of unfulfillment will be everything someone else hopes and dreams of. I was profoundly impacted by this game years ago, but not everything about it hit quite the same as it does now since I've completely changed as a creative. The things I succeed in, the things I'm lacking in, what I desire, I'm such a different person. This game is about two tendencies of the same person, or two different approaches one takes to the creative process that are at odds with each other. Neither of them can be fulfilled in their struggle. And there is something about that contention that fills me with a sort of dread.

Everyone in my position now has warned practically, in some form or another, that art no longer becomes your passion. That you're not doing it for that pure creative process once you find success, recognition, stability. It locks the entire process into complicated material realities. It's not your escape, but your prison. It's not your joy, but exhaustion. I could feel a fear of this looming over me, and inspired me to alter many personal beliefs to survive college. Now I have everything and I feel deprived again, lacking something I desperately wish I could have again, just barely out of reach.

Coda makes a lot of games about 'prisons' as they're called. When I showed this to my father once, he told me he didn't necessarily think they were even prisons, and it was all a matter of perspective. He was right. All it takes sometimes is looking through a set of bars into a place you can't reach, and your mind will come to a conclusion. It feels like a prison when we want it to, or are expecting something more. And this expectation of something more completely corrupts every single game you experience in this game because of the narrator's extremely externalized tendencies guiding you through a very direct interpretation of what he thinks it all is for.

Coda in his element leads the narrator into having to confront and project his anxieties and soul sickness onto everything. In the same way, the forced exposure of things not meant to be treated as presentable commercial products, changed for the sake of having a more broad appeal, and the demands and extra heaping work load and stress that puts on Coda of course fills the narrator with joy. These are not people so much as they are different motivations and tendencies towards art. I never really had the luxury of getting to be either of these people in their most bare forms, the truth and reality and variations and complexities of peoples lives, mental health, financial situations, lifestyles are all obviously far more complex, but a powerful and very relatable point is made regardless.

Last year I made it a goal for myself to go back to making personal art, NO, I made a goal to go back to make a portfolio for myself so I can consider other career options, NO, I made a goal for myself to do more gesture drawing because it's fun, NO, I made a goal for myself to improve my gesture drawings so I could get more professional with my 2D art to match my 3D art, NO, I wanted to create art of my ocs because I thought it would be a little fun and spicy, NO, I wanted to create them because I could build more attention more of an audience commissioners attention acclaim and a clearly mapped progression of my skill. It sometimes feels like I'm at war with myself simply to find out what creative works I should be doing in my free time. And so I chose writing. Roleplaying, reviewing here, poetry, and then... A creeping desire to build a world and series of stories which I could consider a project that makes me proud. And so my own artist tendencies are the terrorists holding my creative drive hostage.

Did it get hotter in here, colder, the air change? Feeling my own skin and the feel of my tongue in my mouth, fidgeting and tapping. "Something's got to give.." I'd chant. "I can't be doing this anymore." I'd resolve. I can't be doing this anymore, over and over again. I need to make a change. I need to be doing something different. I need to be in motion, and if I stop swimming, I die like a whale shark. Only, I already am constantly in motion in the realm of my main work, right? And I want to spend my leisure time doing fun things that don't have to do with making art necessarily. The games, movies, books, anime, manga, music, writing, real life hobbies too. I have limited energy and it's not necessarily a bad thing to spend it on things I obviously love. But then those horrid tendencies still grip me and make me feel a sort of malaise and negativity in the simple act of living.

Throughout the game, there are other little games and parts of the games Coda makes that speak out to me. Only when the narrator is shutting his mouth. Not just the prisons, but the passages between doors, a liminal space of complete darkness where you're encouraged to stop and just wait and reflect on things. Long segments where you can wander to the edges for no reason in particular, and hear the eerie echoes of whale songs and take in the sense of isolation for a moment. Stairs which slow down your movement speed to a crawl as you climb them, turning the experience of ascending into a meditative process. Waiting in a cell for an hour, and wandering through unsolvable, cold labyrinths. Best of all, a game in which you clean a house and make company with the NPC in there, in a place that's cozy, safe, endless.

Here in the dead of winter, I have been biding and staying in motion with very low energy and not expending much of it. Not even to do my hobbies, sort of doing most of the minimum and stopping to smell the flowers or just taking my time to do nothing for no reason. I still feel the pangs of guilt and urge for me to do something creative, to do anything productive at all. But I clearly am just not in the headspace that this part of my mind had imagined for itself. Playing the game again and breaking into tears at several points in the process, I simultaneously felt it was the best thing for me to linger in this empty space the way I have been. But I really don't want to be staying there forever.

It's not a bad thing that I have these productive goals for myself. I tend to be at my happiest when I'm executing an idea, firing on all cylinders, getting in the zone with my 3D work, feeling the creative juices flowing. if I could give myself something to look forward to and feel accomplished when I hit those small goals, I could be happy. But it can never just be that period of up up up. It always has to have downs, downtime, dry periods, a change in lifestyle where certain art may not be ideal or possible. That's life, that's normal. It's not even depression or burnout a lot of the time, but just the nature of what it's like to be an artist. If we were inspired 100% of the time, we would be entirely worn out and overwhelmed and living a frankly horrifying life.

Nothing ever stays. I try to live with the seasons and accept the change as it comes, but sometimes it is just unbearably hard in getting past your own ego or invisible rules and expectations you've set for yourself. Rather than pushing past your own limit and self sabotaging, it's always better to just wait. In that period of transition or liminality, I can take stock of what it is I really want for myself. Not just goals, but immediate sensory things, smaller bits that might bring me joy and peace. Little by little, I can get to know the feel of these labyrinthine challenges my creative drive puts me through. I can feel out, slowly make changes and ease my way out of this place and come out the other side with a different energy, different approach, new ideas, and without anxieties driven by external factors. Without the worst internal factors making me get in my own way.

Maybe it's less of a labyrinth and more of a knot I have to untie. Maybe if I just take enough steps back and recede into a place without expectation, I could let my eyes adjust and see all of this about myself in a new light. It's a problem of multistability, a constant popping of different perspectives, many of which can feel so concrete or true. Speaking of multistability, they love to show Escherian style art throughout the game, and it's delighted and inspired me to look more into the works of Escher in my spare time. Not simply for a project, but because I'm curious. And I think getting lost in the art of M. C. Escher is a perfect place to start a new. If nothing creative on my part comes out of it, that's okay. But if I do some more personal art, I'll make sure to simply enjoy it for what it is and nothing more: art.

Reviewed on Feb 14, 2026

Less of a review, and more about the feelings being invoked here.

I'm sitting here at three in the morning, in the dark, only one awake around me. It's five days before I need to hit the deadline for my work, for a thing I've already paid for my spot in. Without going into too much detail, it's a mix between game art and fashion design. I'm happy with what I'm doing. I feel fulfilled. I've hardly touched Blender in the past month, since I finished the last product. The nerves are eating away at me, day by day. I feel I'm at the end of my rope, can't cope with the world around me, can't have my time in isolation I need, in order to just buckle down and get what I need to do done. It's past the point of no return where I can't begin completely from scratch, so I look at what I already have on the table. More self loathing.

Things aren't going great. For circumstances I can't control, I've been afflicted with a horrible lack of energy. My emotions are volatile, but I do everything I can to manage and keep it in check. As I do, I can't help but feel more of that battery for work dwindling away. A lot of trouble at home. A lot of big sweeping changes, difficulties, medical scares for people around me. Echoes of feelings I finally thought I could get away from coming back in a big way, in people who scrutinize parts of me flippantly, through no fault of my own. Things I can't help about myself. It's not how I am. It's not even how I am, it's an impression people have of how I am. So many more problems. Personal, friend issues. Angst, impotent grief.

I know everything is going to be okay. It's just a difficult process for me right now. Things will clear up. I need to be given the time and space, to get back on track of where I need to be. What does that look like? There's a few alternating voices pulling me in different directions so even when I rest, I'm not restful. I feel torn apart by my desire to force myself through all of the work and sit on the rewards. The attention, the money, the sense of accomplishment, feeling that I'm on track of things. Or maybe I should just let things go for a little. It wouldn't be the end of the world if I missed a deadline. Loss of money. But maybe I could be happier. Recharge in a real way, if only there wasn't this unbearable, nagging and telling me I've been taking breaks for so long and it's not sticking.. So the real break is more work. More expending of spoons.

This games battles with the two characters, they play out in my head every god damn day of my life. I have never felt so hurt and seen and desiring more for myself than when this game came into my life and held the two tendencies over my head and showed them play out to their didactic conclusions. Obscurity, isolation, a sense of happiness with a more discrete and sporadic expression of art, cut off and isolated from the stresses of being known, of submitting to a harmful mentality and ecosystem. And the other, attention, success, material stability, but being overworked, making compromises to my own vision. In either case I can never really be happy. But then again, these two voices never existed. Both are compartmentalizations of issues of the mind, of the conditions that mind is set in.

I was making my own small games in college on top of my classes. I was expecting a career in AAA, and through an awakening of politics and ethics, decided to pursue different paths. Do some of my own things, break away from the art styles expected of me. Build a portfolio around small studios or indie projects. Find freelance work. I had an opportunity to escape my miserable living situation that I'd known half of my life, after graduation. A new state where I could take some time to heal, to recover. My priorities changed. Games and art themselves fell off entirely as things I was concerned with. And then Covid struck, protracting the process of my healing, my deconstructing and processing. Game art even further in the distance.

Though, I did slowly heal. I was in a new environment where I didn't have the space and isolation I needed to do remote work, in a time where everyone was able to capitalize on it. My new living situation, current one, it's too hectic and unpredictable. There's more stressors. So. I at least had myself. I began working on art again, dabbled with games. But what really stuck were custom 3D commissions for people. That snowballed into a proper store, brand, and then ballooned into me properly becoming a freelancer. I'm in a comfortable enough position now, where I have what I want, what I need. I think. But it doesn't feel right.

It feels in a way that I gave up on my passion and settled for something different. I made a choice for money, but I'm independent. I'm my own boss and I did this to myself. I'm the narrator of this game, inflicting my own neuroses on my undernourished unfettered strange artist self. Or, I had wrangled my introspective self into a new way of life I could manage for my own well being. I could frame it to be noble or a personal disgrace back and forth forever if I wanted.

But the entire time, I've always been able to work on personal art. Personal game projects, personal writing. The thing is, I rarely do these personal works. Since I developed a properly lubricated system for myself. More and more of my personal desires for making original things that aren't relevant to my work get pushed to the backburner or die. And when I do do these things, I don't show people. It's raw and unfinished. Only a select few get to know what I've been up to. I feel safe in this. I feel good knowing I could eventually return when I have the energy. These things happen in cycles and nothing stays forever.

It feels like the far more active and externally, materially minded part of myself is winning, then. But it's never desecrated any of the things that I need to be in the shadows. Things that I hold sacred. Everyone's relationship between these two parts of themselves the game is getting at is going to be different. I like to think where I am now is a sense of harmony and relative impotence between the two. In my market niche, I have a lot to celebrate and be proud of still. I even get to put a lot of my own personal style and ethics into what I make. Even if it's not exactly my dream project, I like what I'm doing and how I do it. I think this is a win.

There is really painful, uncomfortable exploration of just about everything I've been talking about in this game. When I try to think of what to say about the game itself I just feel these confessions being pulled out of me and forced into the review prompt because it feels that serious to me. The game is about the agony and trials of being an artist. The beauty and ugliness, material conditions and phantasmal desires, other Hegelian struggles. You see it playing out in the deeply personal, secretive artistic worlds of the main character battling with himself. Tearing himself apart. It's presented as two people. It is one person.

One person who went out of their way to make peeks into their soul, and then compromised them in a way so that the audience would understand. A person who showed their work to an audience but was terrified of how it would be perceived. A person who made a game where you can do one, peaceful rotation of things, forever; not meant to be a game with a start and end, but a conceptual, interactive work you can immerse yourself into and appreciate. One that made all kinds of high concept ideas that would be utterly imperceptible without having to edit and change it so that could be played, so details could be known. A wild iceberg of creativity melting and collapsing into pieces.

It made me want to be more creative than I already was. It made me want to take risks, to not split myself, to have the tendencies in harmony. It made me want to be strange, to make uncut and rough products. But it also helped guide me into combating the perfectionist side, knowing where to direct and utilize it for my own peace of mind. So that it's all in the service of me and what makes me most happy. It made me feel like I made the worst mistake of my life trying to set my career in the things I was most passionate about. It made me feel like I'm hurting myself, every day. Even success feels like failure to me. I want to laugh, cry, celebrate, tear my hair out sometimes. Being an artist really is miserable.

I know my best self is emergent at many different points, that it comes in cycles. That it may feel like a depressive bleakness, or a fake anodyne world of unchallenging subject matter. But it's also a privilege. It's a miracle through all of the trouble I endured in my life, I would be sustaining myself off my art alone. That every day it's getting better and I find new opportunities to pursue or at the very least integrate more personal things into the art I make. That through dialectics, I'll find what I'm looking for. Or rather, grow into what I ought to be.

You either get this game, or you don't. I think it's highly dependent on where you are in your life. But it's movie length, deeply relatable if anything I said here struck you. Why are you even reading this far down? I should delete this. Nonetheless. This is a profound beauty of a game.

Reviewed on Sep 18, 2024

It's hard to look at The Beginner's Guide without mentioning The Stanley Parable. It's not fair, of course, because The Stanley Parable is a masterpiece that no game deserves to be compared next to, nor do the two games share much in common (aside from walking and being written by the same person); it would be like trying to compare the films 2001: A Space Odyssey with A Clockwork Orange. I mean, they're both great films directed by Stanley Kubrick, but they don't even share the same genre, let alone any reason to set them side by side. And yet as media consumers we're driven to pair up creations made by the same people.

Then again, The Beginner's Guide starts with a bit of monologue that literally name-drops The Stanley Parable, so maybe The Beginner's Guide is demanding that context.

But let's first talk about what The Beginner's Guide is.

Wikipedia calls it an "interactive storytelling video game" which more-or-less gets to the heart of matters. There is pretty much no gameplay, with the controls being limited to movement, camera, and an occasional interact button. The story is conveyed via a narrator and a sequence of architectural paths and traces the narrator and his friendship with a game developer.

It starts off kind of mysterious and befuddling. Turns kind of eerie and unsettling. And ends on an emotionally exhausting note.

It's definitely a bit didactic, and a bit more subtlety would have, I think, gone a long way in helping the experience hit on a deeper level. Even so, its approach to playing with the line between creator and consumer--and how uncomfortable that can be--really illustrates potential pitfalls from when those lines get crossed.

But despite the seeming similarity to The Stanley Parable (walking sim? check. a sequence of rooms? check. A parable-like ending? check), there's one big difference: Choice. The Stanley Parable is all about exercising choice. You can choose to which direction to go and what to do, regardless what the narrator says. And when things end, you loop right back to the beginning to, once again, exercise that sense of choice. (I think the theming of the game goes a bit deeper than that, fwiw, but this is a Beginner's Guide review.) Whereas there is basically no choice in The Beginner's Guide. Sure, you can meander around and, in a way, chose to not advance the narrative itself--one time, for example, the narrator sped me through a maze and, after he'd placed me at the finish, i turned right around and headed back into the maze. There was no reason to. Nothing to find. I could have gotten myself lost and actually had to solve the puzzle, but there didn't seem to be a point to it, so I just reemerged a few seconds later having done nothing other than confirm that, yes, there is in fact an entire maze I could navigate if I wanted to.

This makes The Beginner's Guide a linear experience. It knows the story it's telling, and that story doesn't involve making choices. In such a way any comparison to The Stanley Parable is not only silly, it's deceptive. You might recommend The Beginner's Guide to fans of walking simulator games, but you wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for a game like The Stanley Parable.

Still, it does exactly what it's trying to do and, in such a way, it became a compelling two hour experience.

Okay so I really liked this more than I expected I would.

Two of my friends studied gamedesign and the one who is still active in the scene said this game ultimately convinced him of the dream to become a game dev.

I can definitely see why. The Beginner's Guide is a collection of cool game design ideas that are presented as such: mere ideas, fully executed in the strict sense of the word, but without the 'game-y'-part built around it.

The author shows you all these ideas and reflects on them by speaking directly to you. Sth. that is thereby achieved, and this is sth. he actually says, is that you feel like you're inside the devs head.

There is a strange nostalgic mood to this game, because it shows you the sheer endless amount of not fully developed games there are in this world because they technically exist somewhere out there, but if you actually went there, you'd find the vast emptiness and bittersweet loneliness of completly unhabited digital space. A bit like an old abandoned MMO whose servers are still online somehow. Or some peculiar place in the shitty suburban surroundings where you grew up and used to meet with your friends as a kid and now everybody moved away.

The only thing that fills this loneliness in the case of The Beginner's Guide is the voice of the dev and, well, as he says, you're not trapped in an empty impersonal space but you're trapped in an old, forsaken idea of a dev as every single game of those is.

To me, Davey Wreden created an almost perfect follow-up to Stanley Parable. It's very meta again, and even more focused on the theme game design in an abstract sense, but the old 3d graphic and abandoned yet interesting surroundings have a nostalgic mood to it that I really love.

Whether you'll get much out of it or not is a toss up, but this is one of those best played where you know nothing about it (A beginner!). It's a fairly short walking sim that got into my head in a weird way. I enjoyed it.

SPOILERS for those who have not played Stanley Parable: Stanley was a fun time, and what made it so interesting was how you could 'break' the game and do things off the script. That was basically the gimmick of Stanley Parable.

SPOILERS for those who have not played this game:

There is a little of that here too, but it's not the focus, which tends to be the shifting perspectives of you, the player with that of the narrator, who leads you along in the way Stanley does, but that is just the beginning... and it would seem sadly also an ending quite as abrupt

My thoughts on what the game was saying (not being cryptic, biggest spoilers evar) it was interesting because i began to slightly test things and see if the game was going to complain (for example i went straight to the cave instead of doing chores in the house because i could clearly see tht place was illuminated but the narrator told me to go back) but i more or less just trusted the narrator at face value... Eventually more or less just listening to him and letting him guide me as the game intended (if you didnt do this you of course will have a very different experience and it wont work i guess) feels like the finale is in the end where you erroneously might begin to think you're being misled or something and the original 'dev' supplants the unreliable narrator... That's a pretty cool gimmick.. In Stanley Parable it was the PLAYER who tries to supplant the narrator. I say take this idea further and make a game where the original devs some how 'link up' to subvert a player to actually go on to bust out/break out from the game publisher/prison narrator/Overseer!)

i like stuff like this but found that this was kind of a strange angle to go on (having come from stanley parable, actually) to simply trust the nrrator but i guess i'm a born fool!

I have some mixed feelings about this one. On one hand, it definitely stretches some really unique creative muscles and at points can be genuinely moving. On the other hand, I can't help but feel slightly repelled by the game's narrative tactics (I don't want to reveal more than that for fear of spoiling it). As a point of comparison, I've felt similarly conflicted about films like F for Fake and Exit Through the Gift Shop, for similar reasons.

It definitely made me think, though.

It starts strong, with the narrator explaining the why´s of this project and being very sympathetic.

Then, it gets weak in the middle, with some levels that traded a bit the exploration/mechanic part by the dialogue parts. Also, I did not get much what he wanted to convey (IF he wanted to convey anything...). Then, it gets strong at the very end again with "The Tower" level and "Epilogue".

There are sort of plot twits/reveal at the end which was unexpected and satisfying and the last scene at the end is beautiful, poetic. Made me feel good and I can´t quite explain. Maybe it is related to...being free...transcending...

The Beginner's Guide is an unusual little game, one of these "game as art" games, made by the same guy who made The Stanley Parable. It's a walking simulator, but it's more like an interactive story. It's an introspective journey through these peculiar little spaces, like sculptures, while the narrator unfolds a story for you. The story is rather deep and introspective and it discusses ideas like depression, social anxiety, the creative process, game design and criticism/interpretation of games. It's a very "meta" game, a game about games and game design. It's almost like a series of thought experiments which build upon each other, and eventually a broader picture is revealed. Like a layered painting there's a lot of meaning there, but ultimately it's quite open to interpretation and I think each player will take something different away form the experience.

PROS:

• - A very unique game, worth playing for a game experience "outside of the box"
• - The ideas within are interesting and worth contemplating for those interested in game design, criticism, the creative process, mental illness
• - These mini-games or mini-levels are actually really cool, great concepts. Some of them are really mind-bending.
• - It's a cool story, well told, thought provoking and engaging

CONS:

• - This game is REALLY short. Like, around 1 hour long.
• - Some of the narrative feels forced, like the developer is pushing his ideas on you instead of allowing you to draw your own conclusions. Sometimes silence is better than having someone in your ear telling you what you should think. He should have allowed the game and the visuals and environments to speak for themselves more. At times it feels more like an audiobook than a game.
• - One could argue that this is an incomplete game. Like a scrapbook of half-finished ideas (also intentional, but still).
• - It's sometimes a bit corny or hammy. It aims for an emotional punch, but sometimes misses the mark.

CONCLUSION:

This is an interesting game and there's nothing else like it. It's not as clever or as fun as The Stanley Parable, but I can see what the creator was trying to do. It almost doesn't feel like a game, more like a demo or something, something you'd find for free on Steam or Indiedb, it has a bit of a low-fi Unity vibe, but I think that's intentional. Definitely worth trying if you're into weird thoughtful arty games and you want to experience something peculiar. I got it for $1 and, although I enjoyed it, I don't think it's worth much more than that. It's like a short poem. It's brief, beautiful and worth reading; but it's just a poem.

Right after finishing the game (about an hour ago), I would have put the game at about a 3 (for me, though I would have conceded an understanding that it "should" be more). After taking the last hour to process the game a little bit more and read up a little more about it online, I'm going to bump it up to a personal 3.5-4, leaning towards the 4.

These feelings and conflicts this game (read: "experience") brings up in me make me wonder about a couple things personally. Is it "right" to adjust a rating or review based on things you may have read or found out about a game only after your experience with it? Am I too harsh on these "experience" games? Are they missing the mark, or is it me that isn't capable of "getting it" (even when there isn't a specific thing to "get")? These are all topics I could cover in further detail, but not right now here in this review. Just interesting things for me to think about for the moment.

I didn't even know this game existed more than a few hours ago. The game was mentioned by another user here on Grouvee (Incus) as a status update. Their comment about the game was very intriguing, so I clicked to see the game page. I read the one-liner description and it said "From the creator of The Stanley Parable." Sold.

As mentioned, this is certainly more of an experience than a game. I have been going out of my way to try to catch up on some of these from the last couple of years. I like the idea of a "game" not being a game, but an interactive way of getting your story told. Like a movie, but deeper. Several of these have popped up recently, many to critical acclaim (though maybe even more than I think, considering I missed anyone talking about this one). Most of these types of games have left with mixed reactions. It usually goes like this:

I finish the game/experience; I -think- I like it, but I feel like I didn't really "get it"; I go online to see how discussions have gone; I realize I really am supposed to make my own conclusions; I still like what I played, but feel a little empty on really internalizing where they were going with it.

This makes me figure it's not them; it's me. But I also realize that I can't be the only one, and my opinion could still count for something to someone in the same boat as me.

Anyways, that's a lot of talking while not really talking about the game. I feel most of my reviews of these experience-games end up like this. They are generally built so you can't really dig into a discussion much without giving away too much of what someone should really see for themselves.

If you like these kinds of games for their choose-your-own-ending mindset or for walking through a world and letting the game narrate your experience, you would probably be into this as well. Like The Stanley Parable, the game does some interesting and quirky things with its design and narration, but don't go in expecting The Stanley Parable 2.

BUT: Don't expect answers. Don't expect a happy ending.

Also: Regarding the bits in the articles online about people being upset that they thought the creator might really have been putting someone else's work into this game to "sell it" or to even just get in touch with "Coda" for real seems crazy. Not even for a second did I figure Coda was anything other than a character for this story. I get the theories on it being another side of the creator and his experience/struggles with the fame/attention after the Stanley Parable and that's fine. But to think he would actually just plagiarize someone's work? No way. Technically, he has never denied it, since he has seemingly kept quiet on the whole game's details in general, but it just doesn't seem like that would ever be a good idea. Maybe a tribute though, to "R" mentioned in the credits? Maybe a passed game-dev friend and this is his tribute game. I don't know.

Somewhere in this "review" is something close to a review on this game. I am probably more tired than I should be to expect myself to have made a coherent post here, but this is what we get.

9/10

See full review: http://wp.me/p55m9h-10B

There may be some games with technically better stories (meaning more elaborate and whatnot) but there won't be a more crushing game this year. This is deeply personal: an excellent examination of a bunch of small indie games, with Wreden being an intelligent and emotive narrator. It's hard to be ready for the "reveal." Coda's games aren't necessary the funnest to play, as they lack any real meaningful gameplay besides walking, solving the same puzzle repeatedly and occasionally shooting a gun at air, but they work splendidly as concepts, as an artist bleeding for his art (to use a cheesy cliche).