Paradox right out of the ceiling! - The Beginner's Guide - A.R.G.O.S. Episode 28
2A bit of an odd one today, TimeTraveller and Kamica explore a series of incomplete games made by the mysterious Coda, and then break physics.
The Beginner's Guide is available on steam here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/303210
A.R.G.O.S is a series in which Time Traveller randomly chooses a game from Steam and plays it! It could be bad, it could be good, it could be down right horrible, Who knows?
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Gameplay
Like The Stanley Parable, the gameplay in The Beginner's Guide is presented in a first-person perspective allowing the player to move about and explore the environment and interact with some elements of it as they progress along the work's interactive storytelling. The player hears details of the various scenes they explore via the game's narrator, Wreden himself, to describe what they see and make conclusions on the nature of the games' developer. Some areas include puzzle solving and conversation trees, but there is no way for the player-character to die, or the player to make a mistake or lose the game. The narration helps the player get past certain parts of the game-spaces that were otherwise difficult or insuperable as designed, such as by providing a bridge to cross an invisible maze after the player discovers the difficulty. Once the player has completed the game, they can then return to any of the chapters within the game, as well as disable the narration (and the help it provides) to explore the spaces on their own.
Plot
In one of Coda's games, Wreden as the narrator, by removing the visibility of some walls, shows to the user the numerous inaccessible corridors that were programmed into this game.
The concept of the game is based on trying to understand the nature of a person based on exploring files and documents on their computer without any other notes or documentation or knowing this person in the first place. In the game, the player, aided by Wreden's narration, looks to understand that of a game developer named Coda whom Wreden had met at a game jam in 2009. Coda is considered enigmatic, having created numerous strange game ideas which he has subsequently deleted or stored away and forgotten. The player explores these games, most being exploration games developed from 2008 to 2011 that were only half-created, and is encouraged by Wreden's narration to try to imagine what Coda's personality would be like based on the abstract and unconventional game spaces and ideas. The Beginner's Guide is presented in generally chronological order of Coda's prototypes, showing the progression of Coda's work as the developer learned more.
Wreden's narration explains that he was inspired by many of Coda's game concepts, providing his own analysis on many of the themes he perceived to appear in Coda's games. However, Wreden had seen that many of the games are based on themes of prisons, isolation, and difficulty in communicating with others, and as Coda's games took a darker tone and took much longer to produce, focusing even more strongly on dialogue that implied that game development was no longer a positive activity for Coda. Wreden felt concerned that Coda was feeling depressed and weighed down by game development, and took it upon himself to show some of Coda's game concepts to others to get feedback to help encourage Coda to develop more. However, this in turn led to Coda to draw into seclusion. At some point in 2011, Wreden believed Coda had stopped making games, until he was sent an email with a private link to a final game by Coda.
This game, its design in stark contrast to the others Coda had made, included puzzles that were nearly unsolvable and a door that could not be opened from within the game. Wreden found that when he was able to use various programming tools to bypass these, he ended up in a gallery with a message from Coda directed at him, asking him not to talk to him any more nor to showcase his games to others. The messages implied Coda felt that Wreden mistook the tone of his games as a sign of an emotional struggle and was missing the point of why he had engaged in game design, as well as accusing Wreden with modifying Coda's games to add more symbolism, and that Wreden's actions had betrayed Coda. As a result, Wreden felt terrible about what he had done, and thus reveals that the purpose of The Beginner's Guide was to try to reconnect to Coda by sharing his games with the public at large and to hope to apologize for his actions.
The game concludes with an epilogue level with Wreden sparsely narrating about his dependence on social validation, something he saw as the cause for showing Coda's games to other people.
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