Turn Back, Turn Back From This Cave

First of all, have to admit that I still do not feel fully comfortable “analyzing” The Beginner’s Guide. Not because there is nothing to analyze, but quite the opposite - there are too many things that can be pulled apart from this game. The narrator, the interpretation, the obsession, the validation, the relationship between creator and audience, and the strange violence that can happen when someone claims to understand another person too well. There is definitely a lot to talk about. But at the same time, that is also why I feel uncomfortable doing it.

Some games feel like they are asking to be reviewed, and some games feel like they are asking to be broken down. Yet The Beginner’s Guide does not feel like that to me. It feels more like something I walked into by accident, something private, something already fragile before I even touched it. And because of that, trying to organize it too neatly almost feels wrong.

Before I played it, I had read a few things about the game. I knew it was supposed to be strange, and it was supposed to be personal. I knew some people had very strong reactions to it. Honestly, though, reading about it did not really do much for me. I even felt a little bored. It sounded like one of those games where people try really hard to explain why it is meaningful, and the more they explain, the further away others feel from the actual meaning.

Then I played it.

It stayed with me for days. It was not like finishing a game and thinking, "Wow, that was a great game." It was more like finishing something and realizing that some part of it was still sitting quietly in my mind. I could not really summarize it. I could not fully explain what exactly touched me. But I kept thinking about it. I even dreamed about it for the next few days.

I think part of the reason is that The Beginner’s Guide does not feel like a normal game world. It feels like walking through someone’s unfinished thoughts. A lot of the spaces in the game are empty, broken, or strange. Some feel like experiments, some like abandoned ideas, and some like they were never meant to be seen by anyone else. But because of that, they also feel strangely intimate. They are not polished in the usual way. They do not try to entertain you in the normal way. They just quietly exist there.

And that is where the game really starts to touch my strings. At first, I wanted to trust the narrator. He sounded helpful and kind. He sounded like someone who cared. He was guiding me through these works and giving me a way to understand them. But slowly, the more he explained, the less comfortable I felt. It started to feel like the explanation itself was becoming a kind of control. Instead of letting the works breathe by themselves, he kept placing meanings onto them, and he kept turning someone else’s silence into his own story.

That is the part that really got to me. As someone who also makes games, or at least tries to make games, I understand the desire to be understood. When we create something, we want people to see it. We want them to notice the details. We want them to understand the intention behind our choices. We want someone to say,

“Yes, I get what you were trying to do.”

But The Beginner’s Guide made me think about the other side of that desire. What happens when being understood becomes being explained? What happens when someone looks at your work, your unfinished work, your messy work, your private work, and then decides they know who you are because of it? What happens when their interpretation becomes louder than your own silence?

I do not have any answers. That is what The Beginner’s Guide is to me. It is not a game I solved, and maybe it is not a game I am supposed to solve. And maybe that is why the ending song still feels so fitting to me.

So allow me to end this blog with the lyrics from the ending music,

“Turn back, turn back from this cave. You said let me prove I am brave, so let me keep going.”