Playing The Beginner’s Guide For An Introduction To Critical Analysis

Yesterday, while writing about The Stanley Parable, I kind of did a small lie-by-omission type thing. I left out that I’d just recently played through Davey Wreden’s other game, The Beginner’s Guide, and that playing that game gave me a lot to think about in regards to the first game. I’ll be straight with you: this post is going to contain “spoilers” for The Beginner’s Guide, but that’s also a bit of a weird game, so the word “spoilers” feels like it implies more than it does. After all, while undeniably a game, The Beginner’s Guide doesn’t really have the sort of narrative play or inversion that The Stanley Parable did. It’s basically just a straight-forward story that you’re walking your way through a bit at a time. Except it’s not really straight-forward. There’s a bit of a twist to the story you’re being told. Your first hints of it arrive pretty early on. There’s only a scattered few, but with the rise of social media discourse being what it has been, I feel like modern audiences are maybe a bit more keyed into what’s going on underneath the narrator’s story. The rest, though, arrive in a torrent later on and fully reveal the twist if you haven’t figured it out already. It’s an interesting story to hear through the layers, from hearing what the in-game “Davey Wreden” says to you, to reading what the object of the “Davey Wreden’s” parasocial affection is writing to “Davey,” to thinking about what all of this might have meant to the out-of-game Davey Wreden, to finally thinking about what it means to me as a person who played Davey’s games and really likes to dig into this stuff with a critical and analytical lens.

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The Stanley Parable: An Exercise In Video Game Storytelling

A few months ago, back around the winter holidays, I played through The Stanley Parable for the first time. It was one of those games that I’d had on my Steam wishlist for a very long time and just never got around to actually buying or playing it. In fact, my general interest in the game is what led me to be so interested in one of my most anticipated games of 2025, Wanderstop. Sure, the trailer was great, but I’d been intrigued by the premises of the games that the creator of Wanderstop’s studio, Davey Wreden, had already made and so took a closer look at Wanderstop. Without that, I might have written off the bits I’d seen of the Wanderstop trailer as just another cozy game and ignored it, given how much I both love and hate cozy games these days (love chore-based games but hate the aesthetic that often gets stuff labeled “cozy” these days). But, despite my intrigue, it still took me a while to actually sit down and play the game since I’d heard that it’s a game best experienced all at once and I just didn’t have it in me to stay engaged with anything like that (other than Dragon Age, anyway) until just about the start of the new year. So, thanks to the rest I’d been getting and the need for something to do that didn’t take a lot of manual dexterity (I wasn’t able to do much with my left hand thanks to the burns I’d gotten while making my Christmas dinner), I booted the game up and spent a good few hours playing through it.

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Should You Play Dragon Age: The Veilguard?

The short answer is yes. If you trust me and my reviews, feel free to bounce right now and go enjoy yourself. If you still need convincing, then I’m sure I can manage that. The game doesn’t do a great job of selling itself unless you’re already on the Dragon Age train and looking for your next destination. After all, most trailers for it showcase grand, sweeping events that are mostly exciting as references to past games and older characters (and sometimes things that were specifically avoided in these past games). If you don’t already know who Solas and Varric are, you might not care much about seeing them in opposition. If you haven’t followed the Dragon Age games for their decade and a half run, you might not have a reason to care about the arrival of what might be some Elven gods. Sure, it’s all tons of pretty typical fantasy and RPG type stuff, but most of it doesn’t really make an impact without history or greater context (which I can provide for you). Still, it’s a pretty good video game, taken on its own merits, and absolutely worth your time on that front alone. If you’ve played other Dragon Age games and just aren’t sure you want to continue? Then it is worth your time even more so.

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Missing Fire Emblem? Give Unicorn Overlord A Try

I’d heard a lot of alright reviews of Unicorn Overlord. There were plenty of bits that people seemed to love, some that seemed like they were inserting their preferred headcanon and some that was just people sharing the bits of the game they loved most. For example, there’s an exchange between two women in one of the early encounters that is easily read as incredibly gay. It isn’t a stretch at all and while I’m skeptical of actual lesbian representation in this game, I would be surprised to find out that this relationship isn’t canonical. Needless to say, short videos and screenshots of this exchange made their rounds on the internet in the weeks following the game’s release, which is how the game caught my attention. There’s some later interaction that lend to this kind of read as well, but still nothing that actually outright says it or demonstrates it. Shortly after those images and gifs went around, the absolutely delicious food you can get at taverns in the game–as part of the relationship building mechanics of the game–started showing up in screenshots and helped tip my opinion in favor of trying the game out. It all looks so delicious! Not quite like food in a Ghibli film, but close enough that the comparison is deserving. What really hooked me, though, was learning that it was basically a Fire Emblem type game but with different battle mechanics and a better gaming experience than Fire Emblem: Engage provided in early 2023. Which is a low bar to clear, in my opinion, but an important bar given how much I love those kinds of strategy games and how disappointed I was by Engage.

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Spider-Man 2 Is The Most Human Superhero Game I’ve Ever Played

After realizing that I could not be trusted to play a reasonable amount of Baldur’s Gate 3, I made the decision to swap my evening video game time back to Spider-Man 2 rather than carry on staying up way too late every single night. It wasn’t a difficult decision, to be honest. I’ve already beaten BG3 and while there’s a lot of fun to be had in the game, I recognize an unhealthy coping mechanism when I see one and that game is one from its character creator to its epilogue (for me, specifically. And, you know, probably other people as well). So, I returned to Spider-Man 2 and my relatively new save file, complete with a lot less podcast listening time than I prefered and fears about being as underwhelmed by the game as so many other people seemed to be. A lot of people have decried the game as being annoyingly short and while that doesn’t necessarily deter me (I love a game that won’t take 100 hours to beat just as much as I love a good game that takes 100 hours to beat), it had me putting off the game so I could savor it longer. Now that I’m back into it, though, I kinda regret putting it off as much as I have since it’s actually my favorite of the trio (Spider-Man: Remastered, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Spider-Man 2).

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Super Mario RPG Was A Fresh Blast From The Past

Well, it took a lot longer than I expected, thanks to hosting a holiday and briefly losing all of my free time to Baldur’s gate 3, but I beat Super Mario RPG. It was exactly as I remembered it. Well, broadly speaking anyway. All the challenges were the same. All the secrets I could remember were in the same spots. The boss fights where more or less the same. I struggled with the same action commands I always struggle with and had an easier time with some of the ones that relied on mechanical operation from the less-than-perfect SNES controller. The story was the same, the world felt the same, and I got to enjoy my walk through it the same way I’ve enjoyed every replay of the Super Nintendo original. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is definitely one of those games that will always seem bigger and more beautiful in my memory from my childhood than it ever will from any of my replays. It was a big deal when it came out, taking Mario from the world of platformers to the world of RPGs while adding in a delightful cast of characters that never showed up again, and it was a big deal to me as one of the few games I got to play by myself. It felt different from everything else I’d ever tried before then and it was my introduction to RPGs as a whole (a style of game I couldn’t play much since most video game RPGs had scantily clad feminine character in them, something that would have gotten me banned from playing the game at least and probably grounded as well).

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Spider-Man: Miles Morales Is A Huge Improvement On A Great Game

Just a quick Spoiler Warning that there will be some details about the plot of Spider-Man: Miles Morales in the latter half of paragraph four, but I really just wanted to get a pet peeve off my chest. Plus, the game’s three years old, so I figured it would be okay, especially since Spider-Man 2 spoils even more than I did in its recap of the events of the first two games.

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The Return of Pokémon Violet: It’s Shiny Time

After several delays due to life chaos and the general distraction of other video games, I’ve begun playing through the first chunk of Pokémon Scarlet/Violet DLC. It felt a little odd, returning to the game for the first time in several months. I’ve kept the software updated and I’ve gone back into the game once or twice since I finished playing last winter, but never for more than a couple minutes. I don’t think I even saved either time, since I was mostly going in to check something. I’d avoided it for so long because there’d been a lot of reports of save file corruption due to one of the late winter or early spring updates and I didn’t want to risk my complete Pokédex. I figured that, until Pokémon Home was available, it just wasn’t worth the risk. Then Pokémon Home came out and I still didn’t play. Normally, I’d have restarted it and played through the game again that instant, but I have been busy this summer (to put it simply), so it fell to the bottom of my list until I remembered the first of two DLC segments was releasing sometime soon. After that, it was mostly just a timing thing and feeling uncertain about whether or not I was up for more Pokémon. I was in the middle of a wave of depression, so it was difficult to start doing anything new. Once I did, though, I was glad I went back.

It was easy to forget given how much stuff has happened since it came out, but I think this Pokémon game was the most fun I’ve ever had playing an entry in the franchise. I mean, sure, it was incredibly buggy and had enormous performance issues, but it was the first entry in the franchise that I could play with my friends. Some of my best memories from the horrible period that was the start of last winter involve getting together with my friends to play together, do some raids, or even just hang out in voice chat while we all played by ourselves. I think the game would have benefited from a few more months of work of course, but the people making the games have shown that each thing they do is part of a cumulative effort to improve the franchise as a whole, so I remain hopeful that the next game will have everything Scarlet and Violet did, but better. I mean, its not like they’re going to be backsliding or somehow releasing a worse game than the last one. Sure, the games may not have lived up to everyone’s expectations, but they’re still better games than the previous iteration. I mean, hell, people give Sword and Shield a lot of guff, but at least you didn’t have to be taught how to catch Pokémon if you’d already caught one and it was SO much better than the hours-long intro of Sun and Moon.

All the company really needs to do is stop redoing all the Pokémon models every release or two and focus on other work. There’s too many Pokémon for that shit. I know a lot of people didn’t like this game and while I absolutely understand the frustration they’re voicing, I can’t help but think that, laggy moments aside, it runs better than most BioWare games I’ve played right at release. Sure, it would have been better if they’d focused on optimizing the game for the Switch’s admittedly limited hardware, but it’s still not that bad, compared to the general state of the video game industry. It actually delivered on the promises it made, even if did so at a subpar framerate. I’m not saying we shouldn’t voice our opinions or attempt to hold the company to account for what seems like a product they rushed to the market (likely against the wishes of the people actually making the game), I just don’t think it’s worth hating the game over. I mean, it would bug the hell out of me to have worked on a piece of software that was this full of visible issues when it got to customers, but I also know that sometimes your schedule says “release” and you’ve already done everything you could to suggest (or demand) that the product should be delayed for quality reasons, so you can only sit by and watch a minor disaster unfold (save those emails, everyone, because it can be really helpful to show you noted all those issues months ago when someone comes knocking on your door to find out how, as the bastion of quality, test let something this poorly performing get past them).

I haven’t gotten very far into the DLC since, true to form, I stopped following the plot and ran as far as I could in the opposite direction. There’s tons of new Pokémon to catch and I have to catch ’em. Which has worked out pretty well for me, all things considered, since I’ve caught three new shiny Pokémon in the three evenings I’ve spent playing the game [predictably, my rate of catching shinies has dropped off since I wrote this]. I caught two the first night (a shiny Poochyena literally walked up to me within a minute of being able to control my character in the new area we went to) and one on my most recent night. All completely random shiny spawns. Just wandering around the world for me to find. Which is funny, since I’ve tried to go shiny hunting before, when some of my favorite Pokémon were showing up in swarms, but I’ve never managed to get a shiny one during those times, despite how much I’d shifted the odds in my favor. I literally spent four hours shiny farming a Vaporean outbreak and had nothing to show for it, despite encountering enough Vaporean that I should have seen at least four shinies if the statistics I’d looked up held true. It’s been a bit frustrating, to see all my friends have a great deal of success with shiny hunting but be unable to get lucky even once when I’ve gone looking.

Every shiny I’ve ever caught, outside of plot shinies, has been the result of completely random chance. I’ll admit that Violet has been pretty good for shinies, but three of the four I’ve found were found just recently, in the DLC, and this is not exactly representative of my experience as a whole. Outside of Pokémon go and the aforementioned plot shinies, I’ve averaged maybe one per generation, and that’s even counting Pokémon Legends: Arceus (my previous record-holder for most shiny Pokémon caught in a single game). Still, Violet is a lot of fun to play. I miss the days when my friends and I played together, but it has been a long year and a lot has changed since then. Half the people I played with back then are no longer in my life (all thanks to the wizarding world bullshit of February), so it’s not like I could recreate that experience. Now, all I can do is hope that I make new friends who are just as into Pokémon as I am and that the ones I’m still friends with are still up for playing it even though I’m a month late to the party. Time will tell, I’m sure, but I will continue regardless. Pokémon used to be a solo experience for me and it will be fine if it goes back to being that again.

Sea Of Stars Was Worth The Wait

The very first thing I did after finishing Baldur’s Gate 3 was start playing Armored Core 6. The second thing I did was stop playing Armored Core 6 and start playing Sea of Stars. Armored Core was fun, but it was more intense that I was up for in the first full week of September since it had been just over twenty-four hours since I learned my grandmother was fading and I just did not have a grindy, punishing game in me. I’ve since learned that AC6 is a lot easier to play if you do it super aggresively, with a heavy emphasis on melee combat, so I think I’ll have a better time when I go back to it, but I needed something calming and Sea of Stars seemed like a better bet. Plus, since I bought it on my Switch, I’d be able to take it with me anywhere I needed to go. This turned out to be the right decision, though I suspect my sleep schedule would be in better shape if I was playing AC6 since I doubt I’d want to stay up super late playing that. Sea of Stars had been described online (mostly by people posting on forums and not at all by any advertisement coming from the game’s creators) as being similar to Chained Echoes and while I think the comparison was useful since it got my attention, I think it really does both games a disservice. Sea of Stars is wonderful and a joy to play in its own ways that have absolutely nothing to do with what makes Chained Echoes one of my top recent games.

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