Note: this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic is a pretty big spoiler for the indie walking simulator, The Beginner’s Guide. This blog post itself will keep spoilers to a minimum, but if you want to listen to the track, proceed with caution. Besides, the game’s brilliant, so take this as an incentive to play it soon!
Turn Back, written and performed by Halina Heron, puts a neat bow to the deep story one walks through in The Beginner’s Guide. Everything Unlimited Ltd.’s follow-up to The Stanley Parable takes an unexpected direction: where as Stanley sets up a meta narrative commentary about games, The Beginner’s Guide is a commentary with no fourth wall to begin with. It’s a bold decision from the developers with a huge pay-off at the very end; an experience you don’t want to miss!
(Before getting into the game itself, I had trouble adding the rest of credits for this track anywhere else, so here it is: Turn Back is published by Ryan Roth, and its lyrics were written from both Halina and Davey Wreden himself.)
The Beginner’s Guide is a game where its gameplay is extremely easy to describe, but its narrative is much more complex than it first appears. It’s a classic, hour-long walking simulator where one explores the world through typical first-person controls. And indeed, the first level is a lightly edited copy of a map from Counter-Strike, as famed indie game developer and narrator of this game, Davey Wreden describes its history. According to Mr. Wreden, this remixed level is created by another experimental developer, Coda, and encourages the player to explore other games Coda has made. Aaand that’s about as far as I’m willing to introduce about the story.
The Beginner’s Guide is available on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
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