Nearly three years ago, I famously (by which I mean not famously at all) declined to review The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe on this website. Now that the game has been added to PlayStation Plus as a free monthly game, I thought I might take the opportunity not only to once again tell you to play The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe without telling you why, exactly, you should play The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, but also to tell you to play The Beginner’s Guide, Davey Wreden’s lesser known but no less affecting work.

Like The Stanley Parable, to describe The Beginner’s Guide is in some ways to undo its effectiveness as a work of art. I am not, however, here to simply repeat the same gimmick I employed to write about The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. That’s a trick you can only do once, and arguably not even that many times. Instead, I’m here to argue that Wreden is an author who clearly approaches each game with a desire to say something different, which makes me wildly excited for this year’s Wanderstop, and sad that so many people seem to have skipped over his sophomore effort —........

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