Game review: The Beginner's Guide by Davey Wreden is very meta – and rather moving

The Beginner's Guide, Everything Unlimited Ltd.

The nebulous and slippery relationship between a creator and his audience might not sound like the stuff of great gaming, but The Beginner's Guide (for PC and Mac OS only), by Davey Wreden, is actually an extraordinary piece of work. To my knowledge, Wreden is the first major game designer to place himself, as a character, at the centre of a game that lures one into measuring the distance between it and its creator.

In late 2013, Wreden and his co-creator William Pugh became the toast of the video game industry after the commercial release of The Stanley Parable. Their work, which is funny and pensive, is one of the artistic peaks of the medium. It's one of those rare items, like The Old City: Leviathan or This War of Mine, that I recommend to people with little or no background in video games.

The Stanley Parable tells the story of an office worker who discovers that his colleagues have disappeared. Stanley, however, is never truly on his own since he is shadowed by a voice-over narrator who tries to interpret and guide his actions. The witty, affable narrator (majestically voiced by Kevan Brighting) tries to coax Stanley into performing a series of tasks. And like a righteously disgruntled office worker, it's up to the player to suss out all of the means of defiance. One's decisions lead to a small set of outcomes that shatter the illusion of free choice in spectacular ways.

In an internet post called Game of the Year, Wreden described the avalanche of attention he received for the game, "the emails from fans and journalists asking over and over and over where the idea for the game came from", as well as the "thousands of people asking you to carry some amount of weight for them, to hear them, to talk to them, to tell them that things are going to be OK, to not turn them away".