The Beginner's Guide: A Needlessly Thorough Analysis

I would put a visual saying spoilers ahead but I think it should be said out loud for you this game is best experienced blind as a bat this game only takes two and a half hours if you mull over every detail this game is like nothing you will ever play again take this chance to play the game the best way completely blind before hearing my thoughts and Analysis of this game It's tricky to talk about this game to people who have never played it for this reason this video is written with the assumption that you have played it all the way through at least once so go play it please you'll thank me later foreign The Beginner's Guide was a game I stumbled upon a few years back when I started really getting into walking simulators I was just coming off the back of games like firewatch and what remains of Edith Finch and those games blew me out of the water steam then recommended me The Beginner's Guide because it was similar to those games and the trailer on the steam page absolutely fascinated me so I picked it up played it and two and a half hours later my mind was in swirls trying to make sense of whatever the hell I just played The Beginner's Guide is one of four pieces of media I refuse to tell people anything about before they go in the oven free being the outer Wilds House of leaves and piranisi hence the introduction I think that any discussion any illusion as to what the game is about either ruins surprises spoils or sets false expectations for the game I hate describing it as a walking Sim because even though yes that's what it is it turns people away because nothing sounds more boring than a walking simulator I hate saying it's a narrative experience because people will clue together by that phrase using that it's exactly that a fictional narrative it's fake I hate saying that it will blow your mind because people then know to expect something at the end ruining the surprise I think the best and really the only way to sell people on the game is to have them watch the trailer because that sets up the game perfectly and sells you on the false narrative that the game has selling it as a non-fiction and I'm perfectly glad that I fell for that marketing trick I'm glad I went into this game expecting what it wanted me to expect and then having those expectations alone to Smithereens with a story about imposter syndrome artistic struggles and a case study on how to read art when the author is a thing that exists It's a Wonderful game that very few will get to experience in its fullest potential because videos like this exist that people watch because they want to know what they're going into people research and most of the time I'm fine with that I do the exact same thing like I do the same thing with books movies games I research them profusely before going in because if it isn't to my tastes then I don't want to waste money on something that I'm just not gonna finish and I'm aware that this video has an irony to its own existence I'm fully aware that this video is something that at least a few people will watch before buying and playing the game and that their experience will be less than optimal because they watch past the warning yes I know and there are other layers of irony regarding this video's existence that I will cover later in the video but I still love this game with all my heart and I want to talk about it I want to spell all my thoughts I have collected throughout my many many playthroughs of my favorite game of all time and talk about why this game is what this game has to say and why it says it so effectively hi my name is whale milk and welcome to my extremely long and in-depth breakdown and Analysis of The Beginner's Guide so before I dive into the game itself I think it's important to have a discussion regarding how this analysis is going to actually work there are some things I have to clear up in order to make this analysis actually work in the way that I want it to because this game is extremely tricky to talk about just as a nature of How It's structured as I stated in the intro this game is nearly impossible to summarize to people who haven't actually played it and a lot of the text and story of the game comes from the emotions and experience and initial reactions of playing it for the first time blind so I have decided that I'm not going to even bother I have decided purely to make my job easier to write this video based off three assumptions one you have played The Beginner's Guide two you have realized that Coda is not real and three you have realized that the events of this game are entirely fictional first assumption is self-explanatory and I just explained it this game is impossible to talk about while pain bringing to those that have not played it so I'm just not going to bother the second and third assumptions however are a little different these are points of discussion I will get to in time but I want want to put it out here because there is a discourse at a very large portion of people get stuck in that involves these two points a lot of people completely miss the fact that Coda and by extension the game in its entirety are fictional and proceed to have discussions about the game as if these people were real and Davey reeden really did these things the problem with this discussion is that it pretty much always terminates in the question of what kind of [ __ ] is or isn't Davey reeden to take an adage from innuendo Studios this discussion is very closed-ended and always stops at the same point however this discussion distracts from the much deeper Nuance of the text if we take it not as biography of a series of real events but instead as a fiction that has a deeper message to say but I think we still need to take into account and even appreciate the fact that people have this discussion on a regular basis because my reading of this game takes this aspect of the game's fiction as a part of the meaning as a whole so while we will not be discussing the game's text as if it were non-fiction we will be discussing the fact that the game parades as non-fiction for as long as it possibly can in the first place something I also want to to point out is that yes I realized the existence of this video is kind of working against what the beginner's guide is trying to say what that is I'll get to when we get into the end of the game and just discussion of the game as a whole but I want to put it out there to those that hate seeing content reading into this game that yes I know however I will counter this argument by saying that this game does not condemn the deeper reading of fiction it is not anti-intellectualist what it condemns is the reading of a fiction to a point where you are using the fiction to read the author and how damaging that can actually be I will be taking Great Lengths to separate the art from the artist in the situation and never trying to project what Davey the narrator says and does in the game to the Flesh and Blood Davey reading that made the game in all the levels in it that is not what I have set out to do what I have set out to do is to analyze the message of this game and analyze what the game does to get that message across and finally I want to bring up some extra content that this video is based on and inspired by a lot of how I read this game is heavily heavily inspired on innuendo Studios video the artist is absent Davey reeden and The Beginner's Guide while that video is not entirely like required reading for this video this thing is probably long enough as it is I just want to bring it up because it's a huge inspiration and I will inevitably end up taking ideas from that video or adapting them into my thoughts I will do what I can to point out if a discussion or interpretation is directly taken from that video as sometimes Ian says things in ways that I just don't think I could ever manage but there will inevitably be some points that I'd have just taken and didn't realize I took straight out of that video alrighty that's about it for introductions let's actually jump into the game itself I will be going game by game level by level and building a comprehensive outline of this game so it's gonna take a while so let's just jump into it one of the most important aspects to the beginning of a game is to set up your expectations to tell the player what they're getting into the beginner's guide does that perfectly and it does it even before you buy the game I swear I won't stay on this point too long but I just want to take a moment to appreciate the game's trailer on Steam and how perfectly it lies to you I'm just gonna play the trailer for you and you'll see what I mean foreign let's say you sit down at a stranger's computer you start opening up files and looking through stuff and eventually you come to a folder that just says my work so you open it and you click on a random file and it's a video game that looks like this if you had to guess what would you say you know about this person right now like maybe they're kind of goofy okay you close that you scroll down a bit and you open up a new file it's another game do you think this person is Happy are they unhappy now another one what do you think is comfortable for this person what puts them at ease do you think they're lonely what's missing in their life keep going open another file let's look at all of them let's unpack this person are they upset about something or fighting something what do you think makes this person angry what kinds of friends do they have do they even enjoy making video games at all take all of these images hold them in your mind and now try to imagine without ever having met this person who they are okay let's do it let's find out if you're right I think what this trailer does so well and why I love it so much is that it tells you what the game is about without actually telling you what it's about the trailer is told in a sort of hypothetical you sit down at a stranger's computer and just find a folder with a bunch of games and you start to play them as you play them what kind of thoughts would pass through your head about that person it's a good question and it's really intriguing but what's even more fascinating is watching it after you've played the game because the trailer seems almost self-aware to a point it foreshadows the events of the game by saying things like what kind of friends do they have or do they even like making games the trailer also has that frantic open them open them all let's unpack this person and the way that Davey delivers it makes you feel that sort of obsession for probing and digging into this person's life which applies a lot into the game but as somebody who has no idea what this game is about you don't know any of that you don't know how to interpret this trailer all you take away from this trailer is that this game is about playing a bunch of little smaller games and trying to figure out who the developer is so for the sake of argument and to describe and plot out how this game goes about toying with your emotions let's make a hypothetical person let's call them trash for no particular reason whatsoever trash has just found this game by scrolling through Steam and found the trailer rather intriguing they impulsively buy it and launch the game they see the title screen and then press play and they are greeted with a white screen and then a voice hi there thank you very much for playing The Beginner's Guide my name is Davey reeden I wrote The Stanley Parable and while that game tells a pretty absurd story today I'm going to tell you about a series of events that happened between 2008 and 2011. I am convinced that these first few lines of this game are some of the most gripping and effective introductions to any work of fiction ever because it both intrigues expands on the mystery that the steam page created while also creating more questions and then adds on to the facade that this game is non-fiction what's most likely to trash is that they were familiar with Davey reeden's previous work The Stanley Parable and really enjoyed that so when David the narrator says that he wrote The Stanley Parable trash is sold into the idea that the narrator really is Davey reeden the real person Flesh and Blood why would he lie to you this introduction exists for two reasons expanding and introducing the idea of Coda and to push this facade this introduction goes to painful links to do both of these things but it does it in a way to where neither really sticks out to you especially the latter one it never really stands out to a first playthrough the game needs to convince see that this is all a series of events that actually really happen because if it doesn't at least put you in the small possibility that this is real then the ending doesn't work at all this intro also kind of sets up the thesis almost but like in this very backwards way when Davey talks about his intentions for the game to talk about coda's games and then extract meaning from them regarding coda's character Davey is setting up the complete opposite of what the beginner's guide the game intends to teach Devi says that he finds the idea of being able to see who a person is purely through their work as fascinating romantic and positive this is a point of view that the game is actually going to gradually dismantle piece by piece I'm gonna call this the game's anti-thesis not the antithesis the anti-thesis it is the complete opposite of what the game wants to actually convey but by presenting it in the beginning of the game where the player is open-minded and is very likely to say yeah that's okay I'm okay with this let's do this it is much easier to persuade the player by gradually proving this idea completely wrong dismantling the thesis but not stating that is the intention makes it much much more impactful what I think this persuasive technique does is emulate the experience of learning through trial and error or just through mistakes this game sets us up to believe that what we are doing is completely fine and harmless and Davey is just a cool dude helping us and giving us other perspectives on these games but as the game continues and towards the end when we get that final message from Coda we feel a little guilty because the game has made us feel like we were a part of the reason why Coda stopped making games and we feel bad about it we feel very bad about it and so does Davey but then Davey continues to try and do this stuff to Koda while we sit by the wayside and tell him to stop and then we start to antagonize the person that taught us to do that in the first place further dismantling and antagonizing the anti-thesis but that is something we'll get into once we get to the very end of the game for now we have been introduced to the concept of the game Davey gave us a real email that further immerses us into this fake facade and then we're off to playing the first real game that Coda ever made escape from whisper is notable because it sets up motifs and ideas that are just as important as the things that the introduction set up there are a few symbols here and there that make their first appearance in this level that appear time and time again and the level actually mirrors another level and idea that we'll get into later so the level starts with an alarm and you being equipped with a really shitty looking gun you run through the level with Davey kind of just describing what's happening and then we get to the scene where we are supposed to fight something but that something doesn't exist because the game is unfinished as we learn I think this scene is very important but I'll talk about it later I I'll also be saying that a lot in this video so we wait for this door to open and then we proceed into this Hall where Davey points out that you can see the bottom of the Universe from the window this I think is to distract from the three dot pattern that is sneakily placed here on a wall that is behind where you would usually be looking so this is the three dots pattern a motif that appears throughout the entirety of the game and is a very large sticking point both with an analysis of the game and in the game story itself the pattern is you unique in the fact that even though Davey is adamant that he is going to analyze everything about the games this free dot pattern eludes him and so the pattern goes entirely unremarked upon for most of the game until he confesses to us that he doesn't know what it means and that made him mad and frustrated and that he tried to ask Coda what it meant and that he wouldn't tell him again this is something that will go into more depth with later much later very end of the game but right now I want to pitch the idea that this pattern represents coda in that personal part of the artist that exists in every piece of art that is completely unidentifiable or undecodable by The Observer again that is discussion for much later in this video but I would I want to point that out now and I would also like to point out that Davey pulls your attention away from the direction in which this pattern is located and that because of that there is a very high chance that you'll miss this occurrence of the three dot pattern and I do not think that's entirely a coincidence so next we go into a small Labyrinth which Davey points out the obvious frivolity of apparently the space station has a labyrinth on it I sure I don't know and if you can't make it through the Labyrinth before he stops talking he teleports you to the end of the maze to the entrance of the final sequence of the level the final sequence is about a small bug that the game has where you step into this laser generator thingy and then you just kind of start floating Up and Away Now what's interesting is that this sequence happens in a variety of different ways three times throughout this game here during escape from whisper during the tower and then finally during the epilogue here in this first game we run into a labyrinth Davey sees it skips us past it and then we Ascend into the heavens in the final game Koda made our first obstacle is the invisible Labyrinth that Davey allows us to skip past and then after that Maze We Ascend up the cold for boating Tower and finally in the epilogue we Traverse a bunch of different scenarios and the last thing we see is a hallway with the same Blazer that we see in Escape From whisper and we jump into it and start ascending when we start ascending in the epilogue we see a very very large maze expanding into the vast expanse of space and then the game ends and each time we do this we as a player are given a new perspective on the work that we have been presented both in a meta and non-metotextual way as we Ascend the first time Devi tells us that Coda might have seen this glitch and said this is what I want to make this is what I strive for this is what I want my art to look like and so we accept to ourselves that all the games we are about to see are going to be a little strange and artistic but we are also subliminally told almost that this game is about playing games and seeing the artistic decisions people make or something along those lines in the second Ascension we passed through this Maze and then we make a very very slow Ascension upwards where while we do we in David in the narrator both have a realization both about the game's story that Davey was ruining Coda and about the game itself that this game is not about reading the artist but instead reading the art without them and finally when we Ascend for the last time we see a massive Labyrinth and at this point the game hopes in just banks on the fan fact that we have realized that none of this none of the game we have played up to this point is real this game is fiction Coda doesn't exist Davey the narrator is just a character just as fictional as coda in these games all these messages everything was made by a person different from Davey the narrator who is real in physical intangible but this leaves the question of what does The Maze represent in all of these situations and to this I think the maze represents an obstacle that you just have to overcome or a truth that you have to accept or just the work that needs to be done to truly understand the Ascension itself under this reading represents understanding and the realization and the Maze represents the work that you have to do to make that realization which is fitting because twice we skip over the maze twice we just jump to conclusions without actually accepting anything or working for a true understanding of this art this is only one interpretation though and I want to pitch one more before we leave instead of the Ascension representing true truth and realization in general I think the moments that you ascend might represent increasingly vulnerable truths about the artist twice in the case of Coda and once the last time I would guess about Davey Prime but as each realization gets more and more vulnerable and personal the harder the maze becomes the first realization is that Coda likes making more artistic games for fun or that he might not even be good at making games in the first place as this first time we Ascend allows us the best view of the bottom of the universe the second time the Ascension reveals to us coda's letter to Davey and coda's Revelation that he doesn't like making games anymore because of what Davey did and finally the last Ascension is possibly whatever vulnerable truth Davey Prime wanted to reveal in his making of The Beginner's Guide but I would like to point out that we never actually make our way through these mazes unless you're persistent Davey skips us past two of them and we seemingly go under the third of the third of which we just cannot Traverse no matter how hard we try AI both because it's just a flat PNG but also because it's absolutely huge and seemingly endless and we don't have DV the narrator there to make the Revelation for us and for that we feel confused and lost like in the middle of a very large and confusing Maze We have lost our guide at the end of the game and therefore there is no Revelation to be had but there is one we just can't obtain it no matter how hard we read at the moment have you ever realized that at the outset of this game Davey says that he wants to analyze these games but then when the game actually has a message to it Davey doesn't say [ __ ] that's the case with game two backwards where you can only move backwards the game itself has a short little narrative about the inability to see the future but always being able to see the past the messages on the walls read the pass was behind her but the future could not be seen why does the future keep changing when she stops and looks it becomes clearer or alternatively when she stops it becomes and looks clearer but if the future was always behind her how will she find the strength to confront it so we have a game that has a very The Road Not Taken message where you can easily see from where you came and what led you there but as you advance forward in life everything ahead of you keeps changing and abrupt in unpredictable ways which is a cool meta-narrative because the future of the game holds for us is also entirely unclear in neither us nor Davey knows where this journey is going to take take us Davey doesn't actually talk about that or just talk about what this game needs in general one other interesting thing about this game before we get out of here because there really isn't much to say even though I gave Divi [ __ ] for not saying much is that there's actually a hidden room in this level in this room there's a sign that says the future wasn't over here either this is the very first but hidden sign that Davey isn't being all that truthful with us but there will be subtle signs in later levels that will tell us that in much more obvious ways what the significance of that is we'll get to here in the next few levels and even further out from here but it's here and it's important to say now the next game entering is one of the least remarkable games in this entire set but Davey somehow extrapolates so much meeting out of it it actually is kind of comedic but he doesn't do it with this game alone he has a little helper game that comes a few games down the line called exiting to tie the two together Davey asserts that the existence of these two games imply that Koda saw all of his games as a part of a larger puzzle and that all all of them were connected in some way this as we learned later is entirely wrong but it's something that Davey seemingly really badly wants to be true what he actually says after the exiting game is really interesting and is kind of foreshadowing almost there's a bigger picture that all of his games are meant to play a role in some larger meaning that we won't be able to grasp until we've seen all of them and once we have we can step back and start to understand what exactly that bigger picture is Davey's saying that there is something that we won't be able to grasp until we've seen all of the games is true but not in the way he implies with this statement we know that there is a truth about Davey that will be revealed as we see all of his games but Davey leads us to believe that there is some profound truth about Coda and his works as a whole that we will learn by playing all of his games the game after entering is stairs it's the first game that has a subtitle to it this time being nonsense in nearly every direction these subtitles I've never actually been able to make anything out of so most of the time I won't have anything to say about it I'll just be pointing out the subtitle of the game if it has one so this is the first time we really get to see without cheats that Davey isn't entirely being honest with us if you decide to walk around and explore there are points on the map where you'll get a hidden little voice line saying that I know it's tempting but there's actually nothing over here sorry however where this voice trigger is located is also where a trigger for a hidden audio file exists there's actually two the second of which exists in this corner which is very very creepy almost [Music] [Music] oh but even though these are details that Davey just straight up lies to us about not being here they're very small detailed and I don't blame Davey for dismissing them as it's kind of hard to notice them and it feels like more there for the atmosphere than anything else what's strange though is the fact that Davey dismissing these details and these sounds almost gives off the implication that Davey knows that these are probably here purely for atmosphere and because they're there just for atmosphere he has no way of applying them to a larger meaning but aside from that little thing there actually isn't much out here except for the big staircase so we climb the stairs we get slowed and this is our first instance of Davey modifying games which seems harmless at first but in the long run ends up being very harmful and actively works against what Davey is attending to do we'll get into this later again but the modification that Davey makes to the game that allow the game to be playable like allowing us to climb the stairs in a timely fashion or not making us wait in a prison for a full hour is analogous to reading the spark notes of a novel it's the expressway of experiencing the game you understand what the game wants you to do walk upstairs slowly waiting to prison and you can have somebody tell you that's what the point of the game is or what the point of waiting is but knowing you are supposed to walk slow or you are supposed to wait is different from actually walking up the stairs and actually waiting in a prison for an hour as intended just as reading the spark notes to some really complex novel is not a replacement for actually reading the book I'll talk more in depth about this when we get to descent but just keep that idea in mind for now so whether you chose to press enter or not on the stairs you eventually make your way up to the top of the staircase and see the warmly lit interior filled with little ideas for games what I find Most Fascinating about this is that Davey's reading for this game I think is one of the most spot-on interpretations of anything Coda makes here's what Davey says about this level Coda would often tell me that he didn't mind if people thought of him as cold or distant he said that he knew that he was actually a vibrant and compassionate person but that it takes time to really see that it can be a very slow climb to get there I think this is an awesome message that you shouldn't care how people see you or interpret you as long as you know who you are on the inside and as long as someone knows who that person on the inside is then that's all that matters what others think of you doesn't matter in the slightest it's a message that Davey has a real tough time learning from Coda before we move on one thing I want to point out a lot of the game ideas that exist in here are all quirky useless and don't actually appear anywhere in the game a lot of them might be references to various endings in the Stanley Parable further hinting at the fact that Coda isn't real and these games were made by Davey Prime but most of them don't have further bearing on the game as a whole except for possibly one it's this one that says a key in one game unlocks a door in a completely separate game keep that one in the back of your head we'll get back to it at the very very end this upcoming level is where we get introduced to the puzzle it's a simple little clever puzzle that takes advantage of its own mechanics and is just fun to solve but not too tricky if you just observe how the door behaves and you use some trial and error you'll be able to sell it perfectly fine this is a puzzle that Coda comes to a bunch throughout his games and because of that Davey tries to extrapolate the super profound meaning from it but as a lot of things that Coda does will eventually come to learn that the puzzle doesn't really mean anything especially not here it's just a cool puzzle that Coda engineered for the first time after we solved the puzzle we get another game modification where we get to see outside of the walls most of these hallways don't actually have anything in them either being just blank rectangles or a part of the sky box but four of them actually have geometry and Collision in them and are mostly identical aside from slightly different coloring there's nothing to find in them beyond that though the observations that Davey has about this level are just so close to realizing what he's supposed to realize but he doesn't quite get there he points out that there is a lot here that we were never meant to know because that's not our role as a player it's not our role as a player to know what's going on outside the boundaries of what the designers meant us to see how about that there was more to it than we had any way of knowing I actually find it funny that this game comes after the stairs game since they essentially convey the opposite idea so uh in the stairs game a dull exterior concealed or Rich interior and then in this level a dull interior hides this fantastic outer world either way I think that the point is the same is that most of the time you don't get to know what you're missing or even that you're missing anything that's not your role as a player so if your role here is not to understand then what is it the funny part here is that even though Davey Compares this to the stairs game Davey refuses to carry the metaphor from stairs over to this level about how the part you aren't meant to see represents the part of the game designer if we were to do that then he would have realized that we aren't meant to see this part of the designer that's not our role but he completely Dodges that realization and moves us on to the next game the next game is exiting which I've already talked about so next okay so Down AKA The Great and lovely descent it's easily one of my favorites it sets up most of the conflict in Revelations for later in the game and is just really really pretty every step of the way it's also one of the longest levels with or without the hour long wait in the prison so I will have a lot to say in the part so at the outside of this level Davey starts to talk to us about game design and how engines limit what you can or cannot do with games let's talk about video game development for a second every video game runs on what's called an engine which determines what the game can and cannot do so in other words the engine is a set of tools for game development to make all of these games Coda is using an engine called source like all engines Source has certain things that it does well and it has certain things that it does poorly one of the things that it does very well is boxy linear corridors that's why so many of cuda's games are set in these large flat empty rooms is just because he's working with what the engine does well available to the Creator shape what kinds of creative work they're going to end up making you might consider paying attention to the architecture in CODIS games to notice how they seem to stem from an engine that's very good at producing linear boxy corridors he talks about how source is really good with boxy linear corridors and large flat rooms which is funny because as he says this we are traversing the complete opposite from that so this either implies complete incompetence from Davey which is unlikely or just that he really wants something to be true in this case his thesis that the tools available to the artist will dictate what art they can make that he completely refuses to acknowledge the thing right in front of him that refutes this idea and he never even acknowledges the architecture in this level until the very very end so you are left as the player to interpret and process the color and the beauty of the white upper world in the black colorful blobs down below the cafe all by yourself it isn't until we are corralled into a prison cell that Davey actually starts talking about the level itself that we are currently playing in which he tells us this prison funny enough in coda's original design the doors stayed shut for a full hour before letting you go if you don't mind I think we're gonna that which let's talk about that for a brief second so I talked about this briefly before but I think we should bring it up here Davey has edited these games in a way that makes them more playable but in doing so he has completely missed the point of a lot of these games and he continues to do so even up to the very last moments in this case in particular the idea of waiting in a prison is just that to him waiting for no reason in a prison but what Davey fails to realize is that because these games are personal projects made by Coda there is probably a reason Coda decided to make that prison stay shut for an hour but the reason is something that is personal to CODA something that Davey can't or in will never know my favorite interpretation again from innuendo Studios is that the prison is a quiet contemplative space Dakota and skipping the hour is skipping a lot of thinking it's giving a lot of reflecting and skipping quite a lot of realizations that you could have made about the games you've previously just played it's a stopping point it's a checkpoint asking you to reflect on everything and and if Devi would have just slowed down taken a moment done with the game asked him and reflected he might have actually recognized his faults and stopped his toxicity and behavior there but he didn't the irony here is that in Davey's mission to analyze Coda through his games he fails to pick up on the most obvious hints about how Coda might see game design and instead picks out the completely pointless details that Coda inserts and extrapolates meaning from those instead of paying attention to the three dots instead of paying attention and asking the questions that anybody that is competent in artistic criticism would be asking he plays Into The Stereotype of being the literature teacher that asks why a certain detail is the way it is when in reality the detail is just there to be there just to make the scene more lively Davey in this game reads the things that aren't meant to be read or are reading the things that don't have any text to be read and completely skips over the things that do Davey wants to read the puzzle but he completely skips over why the game might want you to wait an hour in a prison this is one major thing that I think the beginner his guide is trying to say I don't think that the game condemns the act of reading a work of art with the purpose of discerning a deeper meaning instead I think it's trying to demonstrate what can happen when analyzing a work and what to avoid when doing so when finishing this game a lot of people walk away with a line maybe he just likes making prisons in thinking that that is the game saying nothing in art has any meaning that the artist just wanted their art to be that way and nothing more that isn't entirely accurate instead the line and by extension the game as a whole is trying to say that not every detail about the art has meaning that we can discern not everything in a piece of art contributes to The Works larger ideas and theme sometimes the artist includes things in their art just because they want to and that reasoning is something that we as the audience have no right or business in knowing but I want to point out that there is a difference between reading the text for a meaning and trying to read the author's intention the text itself has something to say that's why we tell stories and if the text had nothing to say then it wouldn't exist in the first place but the work is inevitably going to include some aspects details and nuances that mean something to the author and only the author we have every right to try and read the text for meaning to try and include everything and every detail about the text in that reading but when we try to use the style in details to discern the author's intention what the author wanted the texts to mean then we're starting to cross a line this is what death of the author actually is contrary to what tiktok believes it's not an excuse to pretend that JK Rowling doesn't exist so you can continue to buy her books it's understanding that as a reader you have to interpret the art independent of the author because for all you know maybe the artist just like making prisons this also ties back to what I was talking about earlier when I said that reading spark notes for a novel is not a replacement for actually reading the novel because while we should read a text independent of the author we shouldn't forget that the author actually exists either yes if you read the spark notes to like Ulysses you are going to get a summary of the book in the rundown of the characters and themes in symbolism but that's completely forgetting that James Joyce wrote Ulysses in the form that it is in for a reason if Joyce wanted to just describe Harold Bloom's day for no other reason than to just tell the day of a random dude he would have written it in a very similar way to how spark notes are written but no he decided to tell it through the novel form and you can't get the full experience of Ulysses any other way death of the author which is an idea Central to The Beginner's Guide is the idea that the text has meaning because the author wrote it in the way they did but beyond that there is no other discussion to be had regarding the author interpretation beyond the fact that there is interpreting to be done is up to you and you alone but this is all stuff that we don't get to reflect on as Davey skips us forward and we descend further the value of this waiting we will get to see later in the game at the very very end but for now we are always going to be bombarded with Davey's thoughts from here on out fun fact on this part if you go too fast by wall strafing you can actually Vault over the fence here and soft lock the game you have to restart the level if you do this so as we make our descent further Davey talks about the discussion he had with Coda about if Games should be playable coda in response to this makes hundreds of individual little games that are just a white box with literally nothing in them and you just walk around this retort is kind of funny because to me what Coda is saying is that a game that is playable doesn't mean that a game is good you can play those empty games with nothing in them but they are objectively not good games there's nothing to do in them the playability of the game does not dictate its quality the content of the game does I also think there's definitely an alternative interpretation here where you can say that Coda made a bunch of games that are kind of unplayable and the fact that there is nothing to play and by sending them to Davey he knew that Davey would rummage through them to try and find something of which there wasn't proving that your game doesn't have to be playable in order for it to be experienced Coda just kind of sent Davey a puzzle and said maybe there's something in here even though there wasn't and Davey still spent time digging through them either way we descend and we see our first example of the light post what Davey has to say about the light post is this it's a lamp post okay I can't tell you quite why but for some reason Coda fixates on this lamp post it's going to appear at the end of every single one of his games from here on out I'll tell you what I think uh I think that up to this point you know he's been making really strange and Abstract games with no clear purpose and maybe you can only float around in that headspace for so long because now he wants something to hold on to he wants a reference point he wants the work to be leading to something he wants a destination which is what this Lamppost is it's a destination we're going to see it in the work as well his games are just going to become a lot more cohesive a lot more fully developed with more of a clear idea behind them and as we go that idea will get clearer and clearer and clearer assuming you played the game like I hope you have because of the beginning of this video you know that this is complete [ __ ] these lampposts were not added by Coda and never existed in any of his games instead they were added by Davey in order to prove the thing that he said about the entering and exiting games he added the lamp posts in order to try and tie all of coda's games together to create one cohesive idea whatever that might be in his head I think Davey intended to try and put little bits and pieces here and there in the game to try and provide something to paint a portrait of Koda with so to speak but that's just kind of a head Cannon for me but what's interesting is that because Davey added these lamp posts and they are kind of parasitic in a mimetic nature the Lamppost in the context of the game doesn't actually mean anything by the nature of their existence they are a hollow symbol as I like to call them let me explain in his games Coda uses a lot of symbolism it's kind of all over the place and symbols have meaning behind them they are objects that represent a larger idea but the these symbols are so integral to the structure of the games that could have made that the removal of those symbols would often change the meaning of the games but the Lamppost is something that Davey added to coda's games completely after the fact it's an addition onto a tightly packed neatly wrapped package that has no more room to fit any more symbolism but Davey wanted to add that there anyways thinking that just by it being there it would eventually mean something it's like a beginner author who wants their work to have sophistication and meaning and so fixates on some random object in their story in hopes that eventually the text will give meaning to it just by it existing Davey is hoping that eventually through brute force a symbol of his own inclusion will eventually have the context to mean something in the greater context of coda's games so he puts the Lamppost there and bullshits his way through an interpretation of what it might mean but because the Lamppost was put their post-mortem the lamp doesn't actually have any ties to the text and therefore doesn't have any symbol like meaning in any way shape or form it doesn't have the meaning that Davey pitches and it most definitely doesn't have any meaning to CODA at most it represents how shitty of a person Davey the narrator is nothing more it's a symbol because Davey really badly wants it to be a symbol this is what I like to call a hollow symbol something that the author so badly wants to be symbolic but just isn't going back to that author example that beginner author example says somebody is starting out with writing and wants to try and write the next great addition to the literary canon so they throw in some random objects in the story say a pink flower and a recurring fox now this author has no idea what these objects represent but they just know that they want it to be a symbol but because they don't know what it means they do zero work around the flower and the fox they just kind of keep throwing it at the reader's face in hope that the reader gets the idea and comes up with the interpretation for them now what's so interesting about the Lamppost is that it is both a hollow symbol and an actual like legitimate symbol at the same time I've already discussed in what ways it's a hollow symbol but with how this game is written and designed the Lamppost is a hollow symbol only if we are reading the game as if Coda and Davey are real people and these events actually happened but if we take the camera back and zoom out and realize that there really is a fourth wall that we didn't realize was there at the beginning of the game the meaning of things like this completely flip on their head in the case of the lamp post to the analysis that assumes Coda and Davey are real it is a hollow symbol but when we take a step back from the fourth wall to the analysis that assumes Coda and Davey are not real then we can see that the lamppost's role as a hollow symbol is symbolism itself this is the kind of [ __ ] that can happen with meta fiction it's so cool the fact that Davey put a lamp post without any meaning projected onto it in an extremely meta sense then projects meaning onto the Lamppost and it's stuff like this that absolutely blows my mind regarding this game there are so many layers and ways of looking at it yet the different interpretations of the game like play off each other and feed into each other the fact that in one interpretation the lamp being a hollow symbol adds to another interpretation in a unique and different way while not disproving the first is absolutely insane this game is built like no other when it comes to its narrative and will continue to see this narrative craziness the further we get into the game okay so two of my favorite games are up next and I love them for how core they are to the messages and ideas that are presented in The Beginner's Guide these two games are core to the discussion that the game tries to have when it comes to creation and being a public figure and an artist first of all I want to talk about the alternate titled chapter 9 Escape it's the title of this section of the video porn stars die too it's a really strange title but I think what it's trying to communicate is really grounded and kind of neat I think what it's trying to say especially in the context of the games that surround it is that the people that you might idolize or see in the light of Fame are just as human as you are they breathe they eat they sleep and they die just like you do you might only see a part of their lives the thing that they do for work in the public eye but they are still just as human as you they have the same feelings they have the same thoughts struggles differing opinions all of it you have to remember that those that you idolize are human you might die but porn stars will die too I know an analysis of chapter 9's ultimate title is a weird place to start considering we just finished chapter 7 but trust me it'll make sense to get that out of the way when we can when it comes to these next few games next up is chapter 8 notes and this one is a bit of a doozy so I'm not going to touch on every single note there is in this game because there are actually quite a lot one thing I will point out is that none of the notes that are unreachable actually have any content tied to them which is to say they don't say anything if you no clip over there and touch one of them they just don't do anything so we're bound only to the notes we can access and see which thank God the only notes that I want to point out are the ones that are either clear references to something else or appear more than once some of the ones that appear more than once are just jokes but some of them actually have importance the big one to bring up here is then one note that says devil Tower star and is copied Elsewhere on the level the strange and outstanding nature of the note along with the fact that it appears twice puts immediate suspicion on it we'll come back to devil Tower star later after we finish the rest of the section put a pin in it some other interesting notes that I would like to point out do you feel like a hero yet is most definitely a reference to spec Ops the Line well done Walker destroyed and 33rd foreign do you feel like a hero yet [Music] it seems that reports of my survival have been greatly exaggerated this is impossible though I assure you it is how not how why you were never meant to come here we have our orders leave the city radio command from outside the stormwalk they send in the Cavalry we go home [Music] result of my country was it none of this would have happened if you you marched and for what we tried to save you your no savior your talents lie elsewhere [Music] this is your fault God stop right there Lugo he wouldn't listen we didn't have a choice he turned us into [ __ ] killers isn't my fault it takes a strong man to deny what's right in front of him and if the truth is undeniable you create your own what the hell happened I don't know he just stopped moving Walker snap out of it I get it we have to choose the truth Walker is that you're here because you wanted to feel like something you are not a hero it's really weird and yeah hey don't talk to me that way might be a reference to how Davey talks to CODA although this is probably a stretch considering while Coda was making this game Davey hadn't become clingy and started his extremely weird relationship with CODA yet same deal goes for I help people because of the internal good feeling I get it might be a reference to Davey but it would have to have been added a substantial amount of time later after Koda met Davey it's a little weird Meg's game includes door cannot open door thanks might be a reference to the unopenable door in Tower stop pretending you are other people is probably just self-awareness from coda's part someday I will meet the person who made this is interesting in how it echoes sentiment made by Davey during this game where he says this was actually the first game of his that I ever played this was shortly after I met him at a weekend game Jam in Sacramento where I grew up I saw him working on this very level and it was just so different from anything that anyone else was doing so right away I was like I have to be friends with this person this is where I get off as a cheeky little G-Man reference and finally spoilers it doesn't mean anything is most probably a note that foreshadows the final message that Coda tries to send Davey at the very very end of the game so aside from the neat little foreshadowing done through the notes this game is most notable for the fact that it's the first we get to see Davey's extremely toxic mindset regarding arts and artists this is the reason for this game being towards the top of my list for favorite levels it's really where you get to see the [ __ ] that Davey did Dakota and it's interesting because it kind of throws a wrench in the extremely linear timeline that we've gotten up to this point before this game we've had Coda made this game then he made this game but now we're at a point where Devi is introduced into coda's story and now we're seeing the things that Davey was around to see which adds a whole lot more context in Davey's mind and narration which allows him to make way more [ __ ] interpretations so here we learned that Davey met Koda while Koda was working on notes at a weekend game in Sacramento and then just decides that they're gonna be friends whether Koda likes it or not which alone is kind of toxic but that happens quite often very outspoken people tend to just look at somebody and decide hey we're gonna be friends and then oftentimes the person the extrovert just kind of adopted does eventually warm up to them and both of them become friends but we see that Coda never really quite warmed up to Davey so then Davey proceeds to analyze the game itself which is where the red flags really start waving Davey starts off by saying that you don't have to read all the notes that nothing extra happens if you read all of them which alone shouldn't really be a reason not to read all of them granted in this case Davey is in his right to say that you don't need to read all of them because cause a lot of them are just completely pointless or jokes and are about what you would expect from a bunch of people on the internet writing random [ __ ] like that all over the place but it's still not a great mindset to have when it comes to art games maybe if Davey read some of them then he would have gotten a true hint as to who Coda was Davey goes on to say that the existence of the notes gives the impression that Coda is a lonely person and was using the game to pretend he had friends and people to talk with when in reality that's just not the case yes if a majority of the messages followed a general theme of loneliness and trying to have a conversation but failing then you could probably make the assumption that this game was about loneliness but for one the notes are mostly all just stupid [ __ ] and for two even if they were you couldn't reasonably make the assumption that Coda was a lonely person maybe he was lonely at one point in his life or he just wanted to make a game that was about that but you can't immediately assume man this guy needs friends but what's so weird is that writing this now I think to myself that's so self-explanatory but I expressly remember playing this game for the first time and agreeing with Davey here I thought that I could assume that I was going along with him so while Davey slowly gets more and more in the wrong he builds this argument that the player is supposed to agree with more and more and more especially if they aren't very familiar with art criticism like I was because of how carefully written and narrated this section is Davey is just charismatic enough for this to be reasonable even though in hindsight it very clearly is not I think we should take a good look at this paragraph of VoiceOver in the middle of the game as a whole and pick it apart piece by piece before going on because there is so much that goes on from here on out that I think I just need to play it for you but it's ironic isn't it that in playing this game and seeing how alone Coda often felt that we get to know him better and actually kind of connect with him to be honest with you this idea is really seductive to me that I could just play someone's game and see the voices in their head and get to know them better and have to do less of the messy in-person socializing I could just get to know you through your work I think this is why I always liked coda's games so much it's like they let me have that connection I felt as though he was inviting me personally into his world and then I feel less lonely too okay so let's unpack that because holy [ __ ] it's a lot of incorrect so first of all it's not really ironic because in this situation we aren't connecting with coda coda is still completely alienated and separated from everything that The Beginner's Guide is this game is not him saying that he is lonely which is something that I want to make abundantly clear and I think I've been doing a pretty good job at that so let's say it again for the people in the back what is expressed in the game are not necessarily the things that Coda is feeling at the time of making it it's just what he wants to discuss in his art so pretty much this entire paragraph can be changed around to say that instead of talking with Coda the game is talking to Davey in Davey years realizing that he is feeling very lonely and sad but instead of accepting that in its entirety he rejects that feeling onto Coda this person who he had just met and doesn't fully understand and decide that yes he does understand him and he is feeling the things that are presented in the game because that allows Davey to ignore his own feeling is the easiest Davey then explains that the idea is very seductive to him which yes that would be great it would be wonderful if we could just see somebody's art and analyze it and always get a really good read on what that person is feeling it is a very seductive idea but guess what that's not how it is it is extremely rare that we actually ever get to do that and it's something that Davey completely ignores it's a classic case of you were too busy thinking about if you could that you never stopped to consider if you should Davey was just so infatuated with the idea that he could know Coda through his work that he never actually stopped to think if it was actually a good idea to do that or not and through this idea Davey forcefully develops a sort of parasocial relationship with Coda where Devi thinks he's really getting to know Kota through the games that he puts out when instead Davey is getting this completely Incorrect and warped idea of Coda while completely failing to be an actually good friend that talks and discusses things in this section there is a particular wording that really sticks out to me DV says that he thinks that is why I always liked coda's game so much he didn't like Coda he liked his games he liked his games because he was able to see somebody who had artistic talent that He didn't and he saw emotions that allowed him to pretend to be that to be a successful artist but we're getting way ahead of ourselves in that interpretation so let's keep on trucking after that paragraph of just so much wrong we descend down and find the puzzle again as we solve it Davey explains to us what he thinks the puzzle means at the end of this level we're going to see the puzzle again and here I'll tell you what I think the puzzle means each of these games represents an idea that was on coda's mind at the time that he was making it and the puzzle is a way of closing the door on a previous chapter of his life before moving on to the next one what I like about this interpretation is that it's actively antagonistic and contradictory to another interpretation that Davey gave a while back when we talked about entering and exiting Davey noted that those game's existence proved that all of coda's games are connected whereas here he's saying that any game that features the puzzle is a game that contains an idea that Coda wants to leave behind and not touch again these two ideas are inconsistent with each other completely disregarding the fact that they're both dumb and harmful generally an author or an artist has underlying themes in a lot of their works so it's not entirely a bad interpretation to say that coda's games all share certain themes because they most certainly do coda's games often explore thoughts and emotions that relate to creativity and being successful and the struggles that come with that but to say that they are all connected and all tell one big story in an extremely cryptic and unseen way is completely stupid now I'm going to come out and say that I do kind of like the spirit of Davey's interpretation here the idea that the puzzle represents a kind of null space that we can stop pause and think about what we just experienced is really neat and it's something that is actually used at the very end of the game to great effect but how Davey presents that idea ties back to the extremely extremely faulty idea that it is a symbol that is personal to CODA when he has absolutely no way of knowing if it is or not in each of his games after exploring a theme that you know he might find difficult Koda can then place this puzzle that he knows has a reliable solution he understands exactly how it works and so it gives him a simple mechanism for moving on what I find interesting about this line is that this is pretty much identical to how Davey interprets the Lamppost Davey describes the Lamppost as being something that is an anchor something that Coda can lean on and relax at the sight of DV also describes the puzzle as an anchor after exploring the Maze of emotions that might have been his most recent game he can solve the puzzle and know where to go from there the Motions of solving the puzzle give him away a moving on which is kind of sus to me it almost implies that Davey just kind of interpreted this and then just kind of copied it dark area between the doors a space between spaces before you move on you get to pause just for a moment a few seconds to reflect on and let go of the events that led you here to step back and connect the pieces together to grasp at that elusive Digger picture like I said I really like this idea in theory that the puzzle is meant to be a buffer between the game proper and the end a chance to pause and think and reflect on what you just experienced except I think that the space in between the doors is supposed to be for personal reflection for you to think about your interpretation of the game to give the player a chance to think about how those emotions explored in the game relate to them and what to take away it's not a tool for Coda to like move on from some traumatic experience or whatever and again we'll talk about how this idea is mirrored at the very very end of the game in a super neat way okay so I've talked about notes enough so let's actually get to escape finally holy [ __ ] Davey doesn't really mention it ever but Escape is probably an extension of the idea that Davey came up with in the great and lovely descent where you had to sit in a prison cell for an hour and just think here in Escape Coda does something else with the prison idea so we start off with the most simple prison idea that Coda came up with it's just a prison cell and outside the prison cell there is a well and there's a sliding door in the Pres cell that takes us through tunnels and we end up in the inside of the well it's like very wind-up bird Chronicle kind of thing simple stuff Davey says there's not a whole lot to say about this which I agree there isn't and moves us on to the next prison game that Coulda ended up making the next game uses the chat system to ask you what to decorate the prison cell with but the choices don't actually matter I think this is just a little jab at the games that have dialogue systems like this and how no matter what you say there's rarely any difference with every choice you make it's always the same [ __ ] and then after making a few choices and some really funny prompts of dialogue The Walls Start to expand and then that's the end of the game I also don't have much to say about this one this is one of the few parts of the game where I genuinely agree with what a lot of Davey has to say I will make sure to make it expressly clear however when I stop agreeing with him then we get to the escape game which I have very little to say about except that in the last one you can actually climb out of the top of the table and jump out of the prison for some for some reason and fall neat little detail probably unintentional but if it was that's kind of cool and then here is where Davey goes off to the rails with his interpretation because he ends up saying personally I think it's awful to watch this to see a person basically unraveling through their work and for what like at what point do you just go maybe there are game ideas other than this prison that I could be working on but Coda doesn't have that voice telling you to stop that particular mechanism of defense against yourself without it you just spiral I disagree with Davey on this front at a fundamental level the prison can represent a lot of things but as is the theme with this video so far you cannot judge what Koda was going through just by the content of his games and even if the games were representative of his mental state you definitely cannot say that he was unraveling just because they thought that the prison was just a neat creative space to be in personally I think that the prison idea represents the creative process anecdote time but something I like to do occasionally is creative writing I've written a number of short stories and I've actually started a novel on a few separate occasions the most recent attempt I got like 50 pages into which I'm quite proud of one thing I've learned from writing creatively is the fact that nobody not a single creative Soul comes up with an idea and an idea that is fully developed right there in their lap and that they don't have to do any further ruining Nation this is this is a complete myth I don't know where this came from I think that every single author will come up with an idea and then draft redraft and re-re-draft just the idea over and over and over again before they even start writing personally my current just fun idea for a novel that I got like 50 pages into is the culmination of like two or three ideas that have undergone years and I mean years of recycling reimagining and refactoring in my mind since I came up with the first ideas and it's just two completely different ideas that I've been doing that with that I decided to just smash together one day here I personally think that the prisons represent that idea the basic Vibe and foundational structure that comes with an idea for a story or for a game in the constant reshuffling and reinterpretation of it as the creative redrafting that is just a part of the process it's like Coda took one of the ideas from his warm room all the way back in stairs and has been experimenting with it to see if something works and something that needs to be stressed here there is nothing tortured or bad about this this is just the creative process this is just being an artist Coda is just having fun taking this simple idea that he came up with and expounding changing and playing with it in new and more creative ways and I think this misunderstanding is what is really discussed in the final iteration of the prison game when you walk into the phone booth you start having a conversation with the past version of yourself who is stuck in some form of the prison throughout the discussion that you have the past version of yourself asks for advice regarding getting out of the prison and you give increasingly completely meaningless vapid and useless advice I think this is the first time that Coda and by extension Davey Prime actively tried to say something about being creative or at least the input given from the outside to creative people in this game I personally think that the person in the phone booth represents the Observer somebody who either was in the same creative redrafting process or somebody who thinks they know something about that situation whatever it is and they are supposed to be the Observer who thinks they can help with whatever rut they think the person they are talking to is in but everything they have to say all the advice they try to give to help them get out is completely meaningless and useless in the same way that giving advice to get somebody out of the creative process is completely unproductive there is no getting out of there there's no need to get out of there it's just kind of somewhere you have to be in for a while you know like a prison and I think the fact that the prison is really well decorated helps with that interpretation it's not a cold and dark and hostile place to be the prison is actually rather warm and comfy you could stay there for a reasonable amount of time if you really wanted to or if you had to it might get a little uncomfortable after a really long time but overall it's doable same way with that creative limbo it's a mindset you can very easily be in for a really long time and eventually you'll be let out it's not that big of a deal there really is no helping out with it I think there is a chance that in the context of the game this final Escape Game could just be Coda taking early Jabs at Davey but that's a bit of a stretch to be honest I think it's just something that can be said about being creative around people and that's really it so these two games are so incredible I think because as you'll see as we get further and further into the game the message that these two games bring becomes more and more core to the discussions that are made within the game from here on out these two games act as a certain Tipping Point for the beginner's guide and from here on things only get worse and worse for Coda and Davey's relationship so I keep saying that this level or that level is one of my favorites in the game but none of them top this next one house is easily my favorite absolute favorite level in this game both because of what it was to CODA and for what it means in the greater context of the story between Coda and Davey I think the house game is kind of the epitome of Davey tampering with coda's game something that doesn't really come to light until the very end but if you have an extremely Keen Eye you might actually be able to pick up on this during this level you would have to take three or four huge leaps and logic to get to that conclusion without the help of some other games and voice lines but you can do it one of the reasons I love this game so much is because of the vibe I am from Colorado and one of my favorite parts of the state is the snow snow makes the world fall into a peaceful sort of Silence to take an adage from kazuha just sitting out in the cold and appreciating the snow and then ducking into a warmly lit house to just take care of yourself for the night is one of the most wonderful feeling there's nothing else like it and house just reminds me of one of those nights so when we do duck out of the cold and snow into the warmly lit beautiful house we meet a housekeeper who we talk with and here are the second and third reasons why this game is my favorite the music and the extremely cozy gameplay Loop so the music in the beginner's guide as a whole is composed by Ryan Roth who has worked on the soundtracks of many other Indie Games such as void bastards cryptarch starseed Pilgrim and guacamelee 2 of all games so this dude has some Talent especially with ambience and because the beginner's guide isn't the most musically involved game he really leans into Ambience a lot of the tracks really duck back and provide just a vague sense of emotion that complement the game that it goes with and if you've been paying attention to my sound tracking in this entire video so far you will have noticed that but there is one exception here in the house the song Va plays and it takes much more of a front seat role in this game oh oh something I find very interesting is that VA is by far Ryan Roth's most played song on Spotify and for a damn good reason it's such a cozy Chill song that you can just pop on and play in the background for hours but doesn't have that droning intentionally uninteresting and unsettling Vibe of the rest of the ambient music in this game VOD does everything in its power to be cozy and comfortable it starts off with birds chirping and then a guitar with very sweet Reverb comes in playing a nice little ditty then a very comfy female voice comes in not singing anything in particular but just kind of humming a little tune and then the song keeps layering things on top of itself harmonicas and so forth to constantly make it comfier and warmer and comfier as the song goes on but again this song isn't like Lo-Fi hip-hop or the rest of the soundtrack where it's ambient it's a major major part of this level I don't think this would nearly be as comfy of a game if VA weren't here to Sarah need us I think the fact that VA is so peaceful comfortable and just Pleasant to listen to makes the ending of this game that much more jarring the third reason I love this game so much is because you literally just clean a house and have a pleasant wholesome chat with your house cleaning friend it's just nice it's just happy and again with this word it's just comfy it's the same thing that games like unpacking try to go for it's not supposed to be hard or challenging or particularly engaging for that matter it's a game that exists where you can shut off your brain and just kind of be happy for a while as we clean this house with this person we get to have a conversation with them in this conversation we have a very wholesome discussion about housekeeping itself and how that relates to Wellness of your own person the housekeeper says that one's house is a lot like one's Soul you take care of it and it takes care of you I think that's a huge message of this game take care of yourself if that means doing something menial listening to Vibe intense music ducking out from the chaos of the world to make a game where you clean a house for forever then do it if it cleanses your soul if it makes you feel better then you're going to be better off by the end of it a very simple straightforward and easy to grasp message and this message would have been a hundred times more obvious if Davey would have just let the game be what it was but now as we keep talking with the housekeeper they ask do you enjoy this and the second they do Davey cuts off the game gets rid of all the walls and the housekeeper cuts the music right there with no hint of transition or easing and says that you can't stay in the dark space for too long you just can't you have to keep moving it's how you stay alive which no you can't I agree with that but you also can't put in arbitrary time limit on yourself you can't just say I'm giving myself five minutes to get better because what your body needs to do to get better does not care about anything else around you it doesn't care about your schedule you need to take as much time as it takes to feel better but for some reason Davey doesn't understand that another thing I would like to point out here is that in the voice lines Davey describes koda's Behavior while making this game grossly happy which is such a red flag Davey wants to see coda in this state of depression and just not doing so hot because when he's actually in a good place in his life Davey sees it as out of character in disgusting Devi isn't being a good friend that is happy for his friend who is currently doing really great he wants him to be suffering it's such a weird word choice there so you walk out of the house climb further up the hill and walk through the second door to find a Lamppost placed in this really strange place so far the only time you find lampposts is in completed areas that look like they should have lamp posts usually coda's games have an ending scene where Davey can just plop a Lamppost and it doesn't really look that out of a place but here we know that after finishing the game this level wasn't supposed to end you could have just cleaned that house forever and this part of the level was never meant to be reached but to continue his narrative Davey had to end the game and put a Lamppost somewhere and here on this flat plane of grass texture with no walls where you can just kind of look behind the scenery and see through the sides of the objects that don't have textures and you can look into the infinite void Davey puts a Lamppost because there was nowhere else to put one I think this is the biggest perversion Davey makes of any games could have made yes there are some modifications that Davey makes to make the game playable in his eyes but here Devi is literally changing the core function of the game to fit his narrative he stops the game when the game was meant to go on forever and doesn't tell us that and then places a lamp post in a place that was never meant to be seen in the first place unlike most other places Davey puts a Lamppost and if you notice this is kind of the turning point of the story from here everything goes downhill first with some slight hints then with some more obvious hinting than with the tower but we'll get there let's talk about some of the more subtle hints that Coda gives from here on out and those hints come from the next few games that are subtle lecture is a funny one because it's kind of a game that embodies one of the core themes of the game or or at least one of the core characteristics of David the narrator and that's imposter syndrome the setting in the game is that we are a student who as the lecturer tells us signed up for a class to become perfect and this person who is talking to us about being perfect is seemingly themselves perfect at least they make it sound like that but as we find out that lecturer is not in fact perfect and instead they're actually kind of an ass Davey says it really well that oftentimes you have to remember that nobody is actually perfect they may put on a facade but in reality they are just as [ __ ] up and clueless as you are they're just really good at hiding it and I think this is kind of a hint nudge nudge moment from Coda Davey sees him as this perfect human that has an endless flow of creativity to make games that he looks up to but in reality Coda is just another guy who probably runs into just as many creative struggles as anybody else and Davey needs reminding of that I also find it really funny that Davey says that he thinks about this game a lot these days we all know that isn't true or if he does think about it he definitely has not internalized anything so at this point in the game we can start to notice a pattern emerging coda's games mostly revolve around conversations now conversations that have been a thing in his game before but from house onwards every single game until the tower focuses around a conversation around two different people whereas in the past it's either been no verbal communication at all or things like the notes or just one-off weirdness like in prisons but it shifts from here to be the focal point from start to finish and theater is a very good example of this I point out this pattern of conversations being a major theme of all these games because almost all of the conversations from after house can be interpreted as a conversation between Davey and Coda where Coda is directly criticizing Davey for being the toxic piece of [ __ ] that he is the metaphor of who is who in each game differs such as in the game we just covered lecture Coda is the lecturer and Davey is the student who cannot see into the lectures flawed and bigoted in mind here in theater the flip is Switched now DV is a director and Coda is the actor one of the first things the director says is that the actor will be playing him which is like right away one of the most conceited and pretentious things that you could possibly say but the director guides the actor through a scene without explicitly giving any lines or actually good direction which is like I guess it could be improv but still the direction here is awful and as the actor messes up again and again the director eventually concedes and allows the actor to just Retreat away in a really hard to watch and play scene so this game is really hard to parse because there is like so much going on here I think it's somewhat obvious that the ending of the scene of the game represents just completely shutting yourself off from the world after failing in some way and Davey even notes this in his narration saying the game ends with an eerie premonition of what's going to happen next in coda's life of course Davey goes on to say that Coda made this game because he was going to do this like he was saying hey I am about to just give up going to retreat due to an overwhelming sense of social anxiety and because it would be a huge coincidence that these two events did happen to coincide with each other so well but had nothing to do with each other it's hard to say that Coda didn't make this game as a way to say this is what I would do in this situation and then proceed to do exactly that as a message to those that got to experiences games this scene of the actor who represents Coda backing away from the stage into a dark loneliness with cages slowly dropping and separating him more and more from everybody else marks the final turning point in the transition into the final chapter of the game this is where games start to become darker more serious in tone and theme and struggle more and more with both the curse of creativity and the toxic relationship between Coda and Davey and from here it becomes less and less subtle the games from here on out become much more raw and start to tackle ideas of creative struggle way more directly we have four games left into the epilogue the next three games Mobius Island and machine will be covered in this part and then I will tackle the monster that is the tower in its own part because there is an immense number of things to be covered there so let's just get into Mobius starting Mobius you are met with the message that this game is best experienced blind and to close your eyes as you play it obviously this isn't really something that you have to do so if you do for some reason follow the instructions the games give you Davey will tell you to open your eyes after a few deaths when you do you see this which is like a lot so first of all this entire game takes place on a spaceship called the SS whisper a reference to the whisper machine from the very very beginning of the game any and all ties you can make to the whisper machine from the beginning of the game are extraneous at best and while there probably is something we can tie back I'm not going to bother and I'm just going to consider it a reference at least and to represent presentation of the first game as a whole at most second of all the thing that is hurtling towards the ship is the puzzle door so we've got the door puzzle a staple and symbol of coda's games flying towards us and destroying a ship named after one of coda's first games if we are to take this as just full-on symbolism we could draw the conclusion that the puzzle the thing that according to Davey embodies the symbolic nature of coda's games the thing that works alongside the lampposts to make his games mean something is hurtling towards the stand-in for his first ever game something he made entirely for fun and nothing more which is to say the symbolism in the artistic nature of his games are ruining what his games originally were for to be fun to be fun projects that he made just because he wanted to the first thing that Davey says in this level that stands out to me is that he thinks that Coda has started running out of ideas that he just can't come up with new ones which is obviously false because yes Coda can come up with new ideas he does it a few more times after Mobius for Christ's sake there are just other things behind his lack of games now that he can't come up with ideas he just doesn't want to act on them anymore because of Davey another really genius observation from Davey is that around this time Coda started becoming more distant which as we can infer was the case only towards Davey Coda started distancing himself from Davey only because Davey was the Super toxic person in his life you know how sometimes a person will just deflect anything that you say in order to keep themselves disconnected all the time it was that kind of thing here was the point in my relationship with Coda where I really started to wonder if he needed my help in some way Davey is really starting to dig himself into a hole he is chasing Coda into a corner Davey is making code is like hell but kodo wants to try and remove Davey from his life but Davey thinks that being removed is a sign of Coda being in a position where he needs help causing him to try and help more which means Koda wants to remove him even more and it's kind of this negative feedback loop Koda distancing himself is him helping himself but Davey doesn't realize this so we go into Island which has an absolutely amazing song in the background it's called be in this place and it's so beautiful but it quickly goes from beautiful to haunting once we actually start going into this game with more depth once we actually start having the conversation that this game is about again with this theme of conversations does the game become darker so we start by asking where we are into the white endless expanseless void and then somebody in unidentified voice says hi to us and asks if we are lost our options are very similar to to the discussions we had with demand at the end of Mobius I'm completely out of ideas when I try to create I feel empty or I have nothing left to give to my work they are all things coming from the mouth of a creatively drained person and then when the person asks what happened we mention that a machine has stopped working this machine is probably the machine we see in the next game which is theorized to be the whisper machine but that's a discussion I'll have in the next game the voice then says that they know where this machine is and that they can lead us to it while this is going on Davey is pretty much just ranting to us and the line that really gets me going is when he says now put yourself in my shoes playing this because right now the person we want to be empathetic towards is totally Davey and not Coda we definitely want to be paying attention to what Davey was feeling at this point in time and not what Koda was trying to communicate through the game that we're playing right now because right now what Davey is doing is giving us his interpretation and then using that interpretation to make us feel bad for him we aren't having a discussion about what it means to be creatively drained anymore because Davey just keeps talking and making it about him we aren't interacting with the text in a safe way Devi has decided at this point in going forward that he has already done all the interacting with the text there is to be done he has decided that these games mean that Koda was sad and depressed in that his work is torturing him Coda is just this faceless creator that Davey is using to get pity points from us the audience playing this game and it gets worse and worse from here Davey has been doing this for most of the game but Island machine and Tower are really where the focus on himself and not Coda the person we're supposed to be focusing on really starts to get obvious I want to point your attention towards the fact that Devi's dialogue from here on is all me I and my no more he no more Coda all about I am I am I am and once you notice it it makes the ending of this game even harder to play than it already is Davey is so narcissistic that he cannot stop talking about himself even when the Revelation there is that he is so [ __ ] up that he [ __ ] Coda up so badly because he was was so selfish and kept thinking about only himself so we continue walking through this white mist and the discussion that we're having with this voiceless person becomes harder and harder the discussion takes a really tough turn when we pass through the puzzle when we do the voice starts to tell us how to find the machine to do this we start telling her absolute lies how we have plenty of Creative Energy in that we can keep doing this and how it invigorates us I would like to bring your attention to how this scene is structured and how much it mirrors the last prison game that could have made when we called back to ourselves trout for the prison we told us that they have to be sincere and that they have to tell the truth to escape or something along those lines all of the words that are used are pretty much synonyms of each other but this time in this game the switch is kind of flipped because in the prison game we were telling somebody else to be sincere and honest to get where they want to be but now we have somebody else telling us to lie through our teeth what makes me like this interpretation that this game or this scene is a mirror of the last prison game that Coda made is that as we continue to break through the blocks of dialogue with our lies dialogue that exists in previous games mind you we start to hear a voice feminine crying once we finally break through all the blocks we're left to see the prison that Coda has created with a woman in it crying then the game ends this woman is stuck in a prison telling us how to find the machine but by the end of the game we don't actually find the machine we find a prison with a mysterious woman inside of it the discussion we had to ourselves much earlier in the game took place within a prison game technically it's easy to forget that the phone game is technically a prison game at least according to Davey it's kind of an entering exiting game kind of thing the end of the prison game is somebody escaping a prison and the end of island is showing that Coda is back in prison this time imposed by Davey in his toxicity and while we see this visual symbolism takes place Davey is talking to us saying things like seeing this game at the time that he made it it looked really unhealthy I was watching him do this to himself and I hated it I hated seeing him so trapped it's like video games are not worth this amount of suffering this is someone I really cared about and I used to get so much joy out of seeing him create for him to suddenly become angry and frustrated like this it was the worst thing for me I don't know this is what I felt at the time I don't know I wanted it to stop more than anything I had never felt so rough I just I needed more than I have ever needed anything for this to stop again take note of all the eyes it's not about Coda it's not about wanting Coda to feel better and when the game cuts to Black Davey says but it didn't stop after finishing this one Coda takes another seven months and comes up with a new game then we move on to machine one of the most straightforward and direct messages bar the tower and Davey doesn't say anything for like the first half of the game so we just get to see the visual symbolism play out I like how Davey doesn't respond to the direct criticism that Coda is loving against him in the first half of the game it doesn't take until Goda says something to Davey directly that Davey gets any sort of hint but we get to watch while Koda tries his absolute damnedest to give Davey these hints and finally Davey shuts up about himself when we watch this game play out okay so now up to this point I've kind of dodged the topic of the ambiguous female character that returns quite often in coda's games early on it's most likely just an ambiguous character that Cody uses as a stand-in character she probably doesn't mean much in places like whisper machine where the voice is very much feminine and in backwards where Koda talks about a nameless she but as the games continue this nameless woman starts to appear more and more until Island where she becomes a very major your character in major symbol in coda's games this woman especially in island and machine represents I think Davey she is codus stand-in for Davey and all the toxicity and evil he does to him deceiving lying gaslighting so on how this all ties into Island and machine I'll get to as we continue on from here and to start to discuss machine more and more when we start the machine we talk to an NPC standing in front of the puzzle door when they talk to us they refer to us as ma'am so we know that our character in this game is a woman women are recurring simple Dakota so let's kind of see where this goes as we talk to the person out from the door we get the sense that we are going to see the machine or whatever that is and that we're intending to almost like interrogate it by the dialogue options we get here we can infer that the person we play as does not have good feelings regarding this machine then the person at the door drops the really important contextual line it calls itself Coda this is really important because we cannot interpret this in any other way it's only left for us to figure out and interpret Who is the doing the abusing and it's really not that hard so the puzzle door opens and we see a hallway with a crowd asking various things about the machine we walk by and enter the room with the machine the machine stands in the middle of a room and it is Rusty in an engine that groans and creaks as we observe it on each side of the machine we see a belt along three points in a configuration that is reminiscent of the three dots pattern that we have been seeing time and time again throughout this game as we circle around the machine we talk to it tell it that it has [ __ ] up that its lack of ideas has done damage we get the choice to pick dialogue that follows either the idea of we are hurt or I am hurt but either way the sentiment is the same the person we are playing as sees Coda the machine as nothing more than an idea Factory to feed herself and the people that are waiting for her outside obviously the machine doesn't talk to us so we go outside and spill the news to a group of people the news that we spill are complete lies the machine never said anything to us any of the things that we tell the crowd it never implied any of those but the person that we play as interpreted it that way and spread that complete lie to a wider audience okay let's pause there and take a closer look at what's going on here because at this point I hope you've caught what Coda is doing here Coda has inserted himself in this game but instead of him being the person playing he's a character but in this game he's being abused interrogated beaten down by this person this woman that we play as and as you've hopefully picked up on by now this person that we play as represents Davey and his behavior towards Coda you are not making the games that feed us you have left us alone I've been so alone all of these things that you as the player can say to CODA are all things that Davey in effect has been trying to say Dakota and was saying to CODA up to that point the line you have stopped working here is particularly interesting because Coda seemingly took a break from making games and Devi probably said something along the lines of you haven't been making games lately is something wrong bringing the discussion back to the games and his work when there really should have never been one but in the end the machine doesn't say anything and leaves Davey in the dark the machine Coda for his own benefit remains silent because he doesn't want to talk to Davey anymore but Davey just won't go the [ __ ] away and then Davey goes and announces this to the public the people he's been showing code his games to that Coda has stopped working that he's depressed and that he needs to be fixed or something the woman we play as then says that we will go fix the machine together and then we turn around and we walk through a door and we are faced with the theater and the gun from all the way back in chapter one falls into our hands we start shooting and our bullets destroy entire chunks of the level around us at a time while Davey talks to us so now the work is becoming self-destructive I'll tell you at the time that I first played this game shortly after he made it here's what I'm thinking of myself I'm thinking that code is stuck in his own head and that it's having a very negative effect on him and that all he needs to do is just start showing his work to people to get some actual feedback on his games it might get him out of isolation and so as I'm thinking this I realize that I could be the one to initiate it because it would never occur to CODA to start actively soliciting feedback so what if I did it for it if he could see the difference it would make to have more actual conversations with other human beings would that bring him out of his mental spiral would it give him confidence in himself would it bring meaning back into his work so in Davey's dialogue he talks to us in a way that implies that what is happening in the game is representative of coda's self-destructive nature or destroying the levels in front of us and while he doesn't acknowledge the gameplay we're partaking indirectly it can be assumed that the voice lines here are trying to get the player into thinking that this gun is coda's self-destruction him falling further into a depression and destroying everything he's created but as we've discussed earlier we know that this isn't the case this entire section represents Davey walking into coda's games and destroying them ripping any and all meaning out of them tearing them apart limb from Lim and making them unrecognizable to their creator in this scene the gun from Escape from whisper makes its return and this time it doesn't have the flaws that it had in the original game in Escape From Whisperer you had a limited number of bullets and no way to reload whereas here you have infinite Blitz and this time the gun actually does something in a more meta sense looking at the games made by DB Prime and not by Coda I think the gun having limited ammo and Whisper when juxtaposed to the infinite ammo gun in its destructive nature is a way of saying that at the beginning of the game there was nothing bad with the games nothing was being destroyed there was nothing there to threaten it they had no meat behind them and there was no monster present to misconstrue them and spread them as we destroy more and more we finally destroy the floor below us and we fall into a white void with the puzzle door below us and when we fall into it we end up in a claustrophobic room with only the machine in front of us with our camera controls completely disabled and we're only able to shoot forward at the machine at Coda we are able to do nothing except to continue and Destroy Coda with his own creation and all this symbolic narrative has backing in the voice lines that Davey speaks to us during this entire sequence which is some of my favorite in the entire game Devi Prime did a phenomenal job voice acting this and he does a phenomenal job getting that frantic existential confusion across in these lines it's so raw and so powerful so now the work is becoming self-destructive I'll tell you at the time that I first played this game shortly after he made it here's what I'm thinking of myself I'm thinking that code is stuck in his own head and that it's having a very negative effect on him and that all he needs to do is just start showing his work to people to get some actual feedback on his games it might get him out of isolation and so as I'm thinking this I realize that I could be the one to initiate it because it would never occur to CODA to start actively soliciting feedback so what if I did it for it if he could see the difference it would make to have more actual conversations with other human beings would that bring him out of his mental spiral would it give him confidence in himself would it bring meaning back into his work so I started showing koda's work to people I took this one and the islands which you just played the theater the notes the house cleaning game and some of the prison escape games I brought them to people that I knew and trusted I asked their opinion and the great part is that they really loved his games you know the point of it all is just to give them some external reference point but they genuinely loved his word there was nothing for him to be afraid of foreign can you see why I felt like this was the right thing to do because it's the thing that I always feel like I need to be told that my work is good that I am good when when someone really connects with a thing that I've made when they see themselves purely in my work there's nothing that feels better and I got to give that very same feeling to my friend I did something I really felt like I've done something good like like I was a good person I felt like there was a friend who was in trouble and was unhappy and and maybe didn't like themselves and I could fix if I could give him this gift maybe I could fix the problem they told me how much they enjoyed his games it was the best feeling it's the absolute best feeling it made me feel so happy so beautifully beautifully that sequence always gives me chills it's better at this point in the game where you start to realize that there's something else going on with Davey there's a little more than just a guy trying to be a good friend behind that voice here we start to realize that especially with the beautifully beautifully happy line the Devi is kind of [ __ ] up the tower in my opinion is genuinely hard to play through this is where we get to the point where Coda is becoming actively antagonistic in his game design and Devi is just spiraling further and further into his self-importance in overall insufferability and he's staying completely unaware of the fact that he is the problem to the core and as we approach the tower we really get to see that so now is about the time I bring up the seemingly single most random thing I could talk about right now tarot cards surprisingly enough tarot is something that comes up a few times across this game but I haven't really talked about it because it doesn't come into play anywhere except for here in the symbolism of tarot cards comes in full force here and it helps tie everything together so the 16th card in the Tarot deck is the tower a card that represents significant upheaval and change usually the visual design of a tower card is ominous and cold and that fits all the right descriptions that pertain to the final level of the game the 16th game to be exact the tower once we leave the warm comforting starting room we get to see a cold dark colossal Tower uncanny both in appearance architecture and context it almost feels like the tower is inside a larger structure implied by the staircases and doorways we can see on the walls beyond the tower so the tower here isn't the only thing going on there is much more beyond the single focus of It the song that plays during this game Tower is an ambient Masterpiece that has feminine cries buried Beyond an ominous Bassy drone it is an ever-present companion to our Ascent only cutting out when we reach the top so what does this have to do with a tarot card of all things well let me bring you back to a detail I pointed out all the way back in like the first few pages of this script in the stairs game one game idea said that a key in one game unlocks something in a different game back in notes one of the few notes that was repeated multiple times was one that said devil Tower star which coincidentally are all tarot cards in fact they're a sequence of tarot cards cards 15 16 and 17. put a pin in that real quick so in order to actually start climbing the tower in you know the actual game in front of us we need to pass an invisible maze that plays a loud jarring noise and flashes red on our screen whenever we touch an invisible wall obviously a design Choice made with not a single intention of user friendliness Coda didn't want this game to be playable just like he did with the blank white void games he made and sent to Davey he made this game to make a point and it's a very similar Point fun fact the invisible maze is entirely doable and if you do it without using the developer Bridge a hidden voiceline plays damn so after the maze we're faced with a six digit number lock this is where those tarot cards come in handy because the combination to this lock is one five one six one seven the numbers of the tarot cards referenced in notes a key in one game unlocking progress in an entirely different game so far the tower has brought back two major points that have been discussed throughout the course of the game The Maze is reminiscent of the debate Coda and Davey had about if games were meant to be playable or not to which Coda designed Amaze that is for all intents and purposes completely unplayable and the key which hearkens back to the idea that Davey came up with that coda's games are all interconnected but also in this situation that doesn't prove [ __ ] just like how exiting and entering doesn't prove that the games are interconnected yes all of coda's games have similar themes and styles and sometimes they might carry over into one another but they don't all interlock to tell one greater story they're all just games that work on their own and I should immediately say that just because the devil Tower star thing is the key to progressing in this game doesn't mean that coda's games do actually interconnect the path games in this are two of many examples of games directly interacting with each other and in reality they aren't really interacting so much as they are a part of the same idea they are extensions of the same creative Branch but Davey fails to recognize this and so he gives us the code and we continue up if you have been paying attention up to this point you probably noticed that I have barely touched Davey's dialogue in this portion and that's for good reason a lot of what this game in particular the tower has to say is said through its architecture and its design especially in the first two roadblocks that we face so now that we've actually passed those I will start taking into account Davey's dialogue although I won't dive into it all the way until after we get to the top because Davey's dialogue here is my favorite in the entire game and I just want to tackle it all as one cohesive chunk so we keep going up and eventually we fall into a hole that has a door with no switch the only switch that exists is on the other side of the door so after all that the maze that is painful to complete in a code that would have taken you years to Brute Force you get to this point where it is absolutely impossible to get through this door without hacking into the game it is such an obvious test for Davey because as we are soon to find out this game was specifically made for him and nobody else and Davey fails that spectacularly and he fails it because he sees it as Coda giving him no way to quote fix the problem even though there is no problem to be fixed it's all intentional but Davey opens the door for us anyways and we continue up and up and up and up while Davey talks to us about how Coda was such a broken person and how he felt hurt and how he felt offended and here is where the self-centered speech gets the most out of hand and obvious the dialogue turns from ignorant to just straight up arrogant and selfish to Davey it was about him all along and Coda was nothing but a tool to him because of what he did Davey begs for Coda to give him answers to talk to him and to tell him why and finally Coda does he gives Dave the answers but guess what Davey does he talks over Coda have you ever noticed that in this sequence it's hard to actually read what Koda wrote Because Davey is always talking it's like even when Coda finally does decide to speak to actually give him answers Davey doesn't actually want to listen he just talks over him pretending he can't hear continuing to talk about his problems when clearly he's the person that's causing the problems and what's worse is that the trigger for Davey's lines here are placed around coda's messages in a way where when you pause to actually listen to what Davey has to say you lose track of what koda's train of thought was and so often you completely Miss what Koda was saying by the time you reach the end of this sequence so this is all to say that Davey doesn't care what Coda has to say because he is that self-centered so then what is Davey saying that he thinks is so much more important than Coda and what does coda have to say that falls on deaf ears well let's rewind to the beginning and start to talk about the dialogue of this game because it oh my God is so good so the narration in the tower is actually pretty slow at the start Davey gives us only one line where he tells us that the tower is a cold game which like duh and then describes the maze when we inevitably walk into one of the invisible walls of it then after we go over the maze Davey drops the bombshell that this isn't the first game that had to be modified to be quote unquote playable in very heavy air quotations he tells us that the house cleaning game in the original version really did go on forever and that you did clean that house forever which on my first playthrough of this game I was genuinely mad at Davey for I loved that game I found it so cozy and comforting and Evie cutting it short and not telling me made me genuinely mad this was also at the time where I wasn't entirely sure if Davey the narrator was real or not so that helped with the frustration I felt because I didn't entirely know to be actually frustrated like I would be to a friend or like suspension of disbelief frustrated like the frustration you feel is towards Umbridge which only made me more confused and furthered my frustration then he asked the ins insanely dense question of but what's the message of the invisible maze which like bro take two seconds of thought I bet you could figure it out Davey then doesn't say anything of substance about the combination lock and then we move wordlessly to the door with no switch where Devi says this the switch to open this door is actually on the other side of the door meaning that it's literally impossible to solve from this side so even if you somehow brute forced your way through the first two challenges and you got to this point there's actually just no way to progress and it's scary for me the idea of Coda cutting himself off entirely just saying you know that's it that's the end of the conversation not giving me any way to fix the problem I feel like a failure I guess when I can't fix the problem I feel like a failure when I can't fix the problem is so insanely telling when somebody just assumes that there is a problem to be solved without asking the person if they're all right literally all of this wouldn't have happened if Davey just slowed down for one goddamn second got off his high horse and asked Coda hey are you doing fine because he very clearly didn't very clearly Davey was so obsessed with coda's work that Davey forgot that there was an actual human behind the screen that had actual feelings and human emotions that he put into his games instead of doing that he just assumed that there was a problem that it needed fixing and that he was just the one that needed to do it was I a failure for not understanding this game I mean I don't know why I would be it's not like everything needs to have a solution but I feel it somehow I feel like I failed and I don't understand why this line is so infinitely frustrating because it's literally going against everything that Davey has been spewing about coda's games up to this point he's literally doing Olympic level of mental gymnastics to justify his actions it's not like everything needs to have a solution is what he should have been saying this entire time because at least that's him getting at least somewhat close to accepting that there is no problem in the first place but no he says it but it doesn't mean it I remember it's June of 2011 I'm playing this for the very first time and as I'm playing I'm thinking to myself I don't know this person I have no idea who this person is it wasn't the guy I knew it wasn't my friend I had come to so many conclusions from looking at all of his work up to this point and then suddenly none of them I have been trying to though that was the thing for years I was trying to get to know him to understand who he actually was and what he stood for I asked them so many times to please just tell me what his games mean to him I asked him please to tell me what the three dots mean I just felt so strongly that if I could have connected with him that if I could have somehow made his work my own that I would finally be once and for all happy it was that I needed to see myself in someone else I needed to be someone other than me but he stopped and left felt somehow like I had failed so it isn't until now that Davey realizes that he doesn't actually understand who Coda is he's just now realizing that he is not his friend or at least hasn't been for a very long time and that now the games might not have meant anything all along and it's baffling how long it takes him to even consider this as a possibility granted he doesn't actually ever fully accept it he just dances around it but he does acknowledge it but that's all important because here is where the single coolest thing I think this game does comes into play the three dots I haven't talked about the three dots really in the script I'm almost 20 000 words in and I haven't talked about them because they are very hard to talk about until you get to this point in the game and that's because up to this point the three dots have gone completely unmentioned Davey has not made any remark any comment acknowledging their existence they're just something that you might notice the two or three times it's really shoved in your face and a few other times it's put in more sneaky places if you're more attentive and what's so cool is because they go unremarked upon for the entire game until the very end most players don't really think anything of them they just kind of see them say neat and then move on literally every single let's player I've seen play this game has done exactly that notice them and then not say anything and I think this isn't just like let's players not thinking about the game I think the game is kind of designed to make you do this kind of like how Davey talks over koda's text Davey also has a knack at talking over the three dots the pattern only appears in situations where you are focused on something else or while Davey is talking about something and while he's talking he's usually directing you away from the pattern he's directing your attention to something else on the other side of the room so why does he do this because he doesn't understand them remember at the very beginning of this game Didi promised a comprehensive reading of all the games and if Davey presents a certain thing to the player a motif or a theme or a symbol that exists in many of the games and then says that he doesn't know what they mean that kind of defeats the purpose of what Davey wants to do Davey can't acknowledge that he he doesn't understand something about coda's games because that can't happen in Davey's mind Davey's interpretation of coda's work doesn't have room for something he can't interpret because of that he just doesn't mention it in the slightest of the player probably the biggest question posed by players about this game is about the three dots what do they mean this is one of the first things one of my friends asked me after if he finished this game and this is probably one of the biggest reasons I wrote this video I wanted to answer this very question so here's what I gave to my friend albeit in a more extended and comprehensive fashion in my eyes the three dots kind of convey the opposite idea for the lamp post the Lamppost is this thing placed in the game by Davey that Davey actively draws attention to that Davey assigns a deep meaning to the Lamppost almost represents the idealistic nature of what Davey wants coda's games to be consistent easy to understand symbolic and obvious the three dots are the complete opposite of that down to every minutia the dots are things placed in the game by Coda that Davey could completely ignores in something that Devi can't assign meaning to because the meaning of the dots is something that is personal to CODA we don't know what it means and we will never know what it means there's a saying that goes every painting is a self-portrait or if you're more into writing as I am every story is a memoir what these sayings convey is the idea that in every piece of art there is a small piece of the author or artist that sneaks its way into the art art is a result of The Human Experience in each of our experiences is completely different so naturally every piece of art that we make is derivative of the life that we have lived but the important thing that we need to understand is that we as the readers should not be looking for those little hidden pieces then we should not be interpreting those fragments they exist in the art as a necessity and not to be read or interpreted trying to use the art to read the author is inherently dangerous I think this is the idea that the three dots are trying to convey the three dots are something that represent something that only Coda knows or cares about out because the three dots are the piece of him that is inherent to his games and because they the dots represent that little piece of Coda we have absolutely zero business knowing what they mean what they mean doesn't even matter and in general the pattern lacking meaning or having an unknowable meaning is part of the meaning itself in the greater meta-narrative the entire point of the dots is to not know because it represents that unknowable part of art to the audience the part of the art that is personal and that belongs to the artist and only the artist and it is dangerous and foolish to try and read into and try and extrapolate meaning from those parts this is really a message I think is at the core of the beginner's guide art is meant to be read into and interpreted if it wasn't then it wouldn't really be art but there is a fine line that we the audience should not be Crossing there are things that we can interpret in ways we can interpret them but there is a point where we are no longer restraining ourselves to the text in only the text and instead trying to interpret based on the context of the author the person who wrote the piece to a point where our interpretations lose meaning when we start to try to read the author we are starting to do something that is affecting a real human being projecting ideas beliefs and behavior onto somebody that we do not know and who does not know us we have the responsibility to avoid psycho analyzing the author through their work because a lot of times the conclusions we come up with are completely wrong and will often paint the author in a completely awful light I think Oscar Wilde Put It Best in his often overlooked preface to his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray which took the form of this really strange poem thing where he pretty much Nails the things that Davey Prime is trying to convey in beginner's guide more specifically in the first few lines the artist is the creator of beautiful things to reveal art and conceal the artist is Art's aim the critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impressions of beautiful things the highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography those who find ugly meanings and beautiful things are corrupt without being Charming this is a fault those who find beautiful meanings and beautiful things are the cultivated for these there are hope and I want to take an aside here because the thing that I've been spending over 600 words trying to explain Oscar Wilde did an 83 that Mane was a genius so after that block of narration we get to the top of the tower which looks a lot like the room we started the tower in as well as a lot of other rooms across the games most notably the prison escape tutorial room and here it gets tricky because as I have demonstrated earlier Davey actually talks over coda's writing even though Coda isn't actually here everyone of Davey's voice line cues in this section are at the same spot where one of coda's messages comes into view so you have to either read while you listen to Davey which makes reading harder or you have to patiently wait for Davey to stop being a self-centered [ __ ] for one second and then read what Coda has to say either way it's not fun because of this I'm going to read coda's entire letter cover to cover and talk about what he's saying here and then loop back around and talk about what Davey has to say on the topic dear Davey thank you for your interest in my games I need to ask you not to speak to me anymore I wonder at times whether you think I am making these games for you you've so infected my personal space that it's possible I did begin to plant Solutions in my work somewhere hidden between games if there was an answer a meeting would it make you any happier would you stop taking my games and showing them to people against my wishes giving them something that is not yours to give violating the one boundary that keeps me safe would you stop changing my games stop adding lamp posts to them would you simply let them be what they are when I am around you I feel physically ill you desperately need something and I cannot give it to you I literally do not have it struggling to come up with new ideas is not making me depressed low points are just part of the process the fact that you think I am frustrated or broken says more about you than about me I realize that this doesn't make sense to you just yet which is fine you're not my problem to solve but I do hope that one day it clicks in that you make peace with this thing that you are wrestling and when you finally see what I am talking about don't say anything so obviously this letter is pretty much everything short of a restraining order its code of finally communicating that he wants literally nothing to do with Davey from here on out it's Coda being fed up with Davey's toxic [ __ ] to where he finally just bit the bullet and decided to be brutally honest with the man this letter gives the impression that Coda really tried to be patient with Davey giving him space and pretending that what he was doing with his games wasn't that awful but eventually Davey did it so much into such a degree that it made Coda physically feel ill I did say that I wanted to cover coda's letter first in its entirety but that's not because there's something here to analyze I mean there is and that's what the next few paragraphs are for no the main reason I wanted to cover this first is because I don't think I've ever read the letter in its entirety without Davey's narration on top of it and once you put the letter by itself and give it the dramatic reading that I just did you can really feel the absolute Venom that Coda feels toward Davey he isn't just a disgruntled friend he is hurt and damaged from what Davey did and it isn't until you actually read the letter from start to finish format like an actual letter do you get that feeling which as everything that Davey does in this game makes the case worse for him I think there are a few things to take away from this letter one at least at the beginning Coda did not intend his games to have some larger meta meeting this is an assumption I've been making since the beginning however the beginning of this letter confirms that Coda says that perhaps he did start implementing a larger secret narrative to his games but only started possibly doing so when Davey started getting his grubby little fingers on Cutters work and it should be noted that if Coda did start adding a secret narrative to his games or not is completely irrelevant the reason he even mentions it is to demonstrate how poisonous his relationship to Davey was that Davey's action started to make Koda question the genuineness of his work which is something that really should never happen to an artist you should always have full confidence in what your work is as an artist and DV started to force Coda into questioning that and more importantly Davey started gaslighting Coda into believing that two Davey started collecting Distributing and collecting feedback on coda's games while Coda was still making them and Koda was fully aware of what Davey was doing and it was against coda's wishes Coda presumably directly asked Davey to not do that Coda did not want the wider world to see his work but Davey did what Davey duton did three that Davey was adding the Lamppost to the game this is one of the largest Revelations we get in the entirety of The Beginner's Guide probably bigger than the three dots and it's the turning point in the game for the final time this is where we start to antagonize Davey and where the game really starts to return to and fully dismantle the anti-thesis that I defined way back at the beginning of this video nearly two hours ago at this point and four kodo realizes that something is so deeply wrong with Davey and that it's something that Davey hasn't realized yet and that he is not the person to fix the problem because Coda understands that there is a boundary unlike Davey who really wants to fix the problem Koda knows that he is not the person to do it he quote literally does not have it we know that Coda is a sane rational person but this really puts the nail in the coffin that Coda is a sane regular normal person that debuted the narrator completely dismantled and destroyed because of Davey's selfish pathologic behaviors so let's return to that anti-thesis idea that I talked about earlier up to this point for the most part we have been slowly chipping away and slowly building a list of reasons why the idea of reading an author through their work is probably not that great but it really isn't until we hear from the author themselves that is a victim of this that we get the Capstone piece of evidence that we need to say that yes this is entirely wrong this is not how we interact with art at the end of the day the one thing that this game really has to say goes back to what I was saying when we were talking about the three dots we should not be reading into the author because when we do and we are allowed enough about it we can start to affect the artist in ways that are actively detrimental and coda's letter here is the case study of that Davy's forced interpretation of who Coda is Led Davey to the conclusion that Coda is depressed creatively struggling when that's not true and that led to Davey sharing coda's games against his wishes ruined a relationship with somebody he once considered a friend and ultimately killed his love for game creation it's with this letter that the game's true message becomes clear and is Thoroughly proven art is for us to read but not for us to read the author the rest of this game is either driving that home or wrapping up some other themes that have been scattered throughout the plot Davey's side of the scene is just more of his self-righteous circle jerking with a little bit of a budding self-awareness starting to shine through it took until Coda spoke out directly saying that he was hurt for Davey to realize what he was doing was wrong and that he was the reason Koda stopped making games everything that ruined this wonderful relationship for Davey was his faults and nothing more I'm the reason that you stopped making games aren't I because of what I did poisoned it for you I don't think I ever told you this but when I took your work and I was showing it to people it actually felt it felt as though I were responsible for something important and valuable and the people who played them they treated me like I was important they really listened and cared about what I had to say even though I was showing your work it was I felt good about myself finally for a moment while I had that I liked myself finally Davey starts to realize what he did is absolutely and phenomenally [ __ ] up and no longer is he trying to rationalize it he has finally reached a form of acceptance that what he did was wrong and no longer is he trying to sugarcoat it he just States the facts and that's the first step in fixing your mistakes realizing that you made a mistake in the first place and then you stopped and I didn't have anything left to show people I I just had to be with myself and as soon as that happened there was no feeling at all nothing less than nothing what does that mean he is starting to question why he feels the way he does when up to this point he hasn't even realized that he was feeling something that might have been different or wrong or damaging to others I'm afraid that I did something really stupid because I don't like myself and there is the real root of the problem he did this because Davey doesn't like himself Davey did these things because he does not think of his creativity as worthy or good enough and so found the creativity he strived for in coda's work and then proceeded to all but steal it that's why I'm releasing this collection of your work is because I haven't been able to find any other way to reach you I've tried everything and so a part of me has hope that if I put this compilation out into the world and if I put my name on it that maybe enough people will play it so that it'll find its way to you so that I can tell you that I'm sorry I know I screwed up if I apologize to you truly and deeply will you start making games again please I need to feel okay with myself again and I always felt okay as long as I had your work to see myself in I mean is is something wrong with me because I know that I did an awful thing and I'm doing it again right now like I'm showing people your work but I can't stop myself from doing it that's how badly I need to feel something again like I'm an addict there has to be something wrong with me can I apologize what if I tell you I was wrong will that work will that fix it I I don't know I don't think it will but there's nothing else that I can do just tell me what you want I'm I'm sorry I'm sorry please start making games again please help me please give me some of whatever it is that that makes you complete I want whatever that wholeness is that you just summoned out of nothing and you put into your work you were complete in some way that I never was I want to know how to doubt I want to know how to be a good person I want to know how not to hate myself please I'm fading and all I want is to know that I'm going to be okay and now he's finally starting to apologize he wants to say sorry he wants to make it up Dakota but it isn't all right and good now because Davey is still fighting and begging for that creativity that Coda has that he thinks he doesn't he still is doing all of this because he wants to keep stealing from Coda even though from his tone in his lines he realizes it is something that he will never get Coda will never ever come back I want to give David Reed and Davey Prime the person that made this game the full credits Fray a wonderful performance the man isn't a voice actor as far as I know and did this purely as a passion project but the performance he put into this game is absolutely phenomenal the breakdown that David the narrator has in this scene is so believable and Sublime that it kept me sold all the way through the switch on the inside of the door is a brilliant little twist too and the increasingly tightening dark Space is really really sweet it really sells the feel of the panic attack or breakdown or whatever is going on with Davey in the scene and I love it it really is the first time Davey's starts to be entirely honest with us and this breakdown causes him to really start to reflect and that reflection changes him and that change leads us into the epilogue the 17th and final chapter of The Beginner's Guide a lot of people when coming out of the game question what the point of this epilogue is there aren't really very many lines from Davey and it mostly is just a silent walking experience walking through some really cool albeit somewhat trippy surreal and liminal locations and it took me a number of playthroughs to fully understand what it was for as well until I took the time to think back to the very first time I ever played this game and what the epilogue provided for me time space and silence time to walk space to reflect and silence to think one of the most effective things that a game called pathologic does in its gameplay is give the player ample time to just simply walk at a painstakingly slow pace and with that time there really isn't much to do except to think and that thinking really gets you to start reflecting on the events of that game to question recent dialogues you've had and to really start to plan who you're going to side with and how you're going to attack the Future Days the epilogue in The Beginner's Guide is much the same in this level Davey has a grand total of 11 spoken lines it is easily the least dense his narration ever is in this game it's hard to quantify but it's really easy to tell that Davey is just absent from this level and when he is talking he's mostly talking about leaving you alone to be left with your thoughts and I think that's by Design I think really the point of this level is to give the player space to reflect on the events that just transpired and to make the Revelation that what just happened is not real you have to remember that at no point does the game actually do anything to break the illusion that none of this is real even through the epilogue it doesn't do anything to say that hey this is not real and there are still people that will argue that the events of this game really did happen to this day but I think that the game does want you to realize this and that it built in this little chunk of the game a point where Davey is not with you to provide you with his interpretation a point where you do not have somebody telling you how to interpret what you have just played to actually think and come up with your own theories and ideas when I first played the game this chapter is where I started to think that this game wasn't real all the way up to this point of the game I was sold that what I was experiencing was entirely real because Davey told me it was but it wasn't until I was given a silent part of the game to just walk and think that I started to question anything it wasn't until this point that I started to wonder why the hell a man had a breakdown while recording and then decided to keep that recording then decided to implement that recording into a game and then proceed to put that game on Steam to profit off of it was that thought that single question that broke the illusion which made the game that much more effective and if the game didn't give me the space to still interact with the game but with space to think and reflect I probably would not have made that Revelation and I probably would not have fallen in love with the game as I have now even when you watch people play this game on YouTube it's very common for them to take this part of the game to just give their thoughts on what just happened but doesn't that sound familiar a space where you're left alone with your own thoughts to connect pieces together and because there's this dark area between the doors a space between spaces before you move on you get to pause just for a moment a few seconds to reflect on and let go of the events that led you here to step back and connect the pieces together you could grasp at that elusive bigger picture that is Davey describing the dark spaces between the two puzzle doors I do believe that the epilogue is supposed to be its own version of The Space Between the doors because the parallels between the two are almost uncanny at least to me that's what it is what Davey has to say in this part of the game again isn't much I'll play all of his dialogue here and then talk about the little there is to talk about because yeah it's very minimal [Music] [Music] more people telling me that I'm good always more and more and more it's like a disease solution guess if someone had told me ahead of time that he just really enjoyed making prison games maybe I wouldn't have thought he was so desperate I wouldn't have told so many people that he was depressed just likes making prisons even now the disease is telling me to stop don't show people what a shitty person you are they'll hate you if I knew that my life depended on finding something to be driven by other than validation ha it's strange but the thought of not being driven by external validation is unthinkable like I actually cannot conceive of what that would be like what now I think I need to go and I'm sorry because I know that I said that I would be here and I would walk you through this but I'm starting to feel like I have a lot of work to do I have a lot that I need to make up for and so I'm just gonna okay really the only thing here to talk about is the line that most people walk away from this game with maybe he just liked making prisons which is something I've talked about before when I talked about it back in part five I talked about how there is a difference between reading a text and reading the author through the text and this is Davey realizing that him saying maybe he just liked making prisons is not Davey conceding to the fact that Coda made prison games just because he liked them it's him recognizing that whether he made prison games because he liked it or because he had an obsessive fit and wanted to make a series of games to communicate with and otherworldly species it doesn't matter because what kodo wanted to do doesn't matter and then the rest of this level is just Davey describing what's wrong with him which again is amazingly performed and then he just leaves which as he says is something he told us he wouldn't do which Marks One Last lie that Davey told us and then he really does just leave us for the rest of the game so really the last thing I have left to talk about is the last scene where we ascend one last time now that we've hopefully fully and properly understood what the game is trying to say and now we can see the final maze which we have already covered and we hear the credit song Turn back and the lyrics of the song make it sound like you are faced with a labyrinth and that you should just turn back now and not brave the challenge ahead because it's fruitless it's not worth it and you're already tired and I'm gonna be honest and I know this is an awful way to end this chapter but the meaning of the last song has always gone over my head I've never been able to come up with an answer to it even though my many many playthroughs of this game and I think it's fitting because not everything is meant to be solved even with a script that is 25 000 words long I can't give an answer to everything and I think that's an important thing to accept and as we'll see in the next part is something that Davey wanted to say with this game so so I've ran multiple ideas for this conclusion through my head many many times each and every time it's hard to wrap everything that I've covered in this video up into a nice little package mostly because this video ended up being absolutely colossal uh when I started writing this video on April 4th of 2022 I knew that this video was going to be big but I didn't quite expect it to get this big the more I wrote though and the more I started to discover about this game the more I played and read in research the more complex my interpretations of this game got and because of that it eventually ballooned into this massive script that it is now I expected this video to run for about an hour oh how wrong I was and I really wish that I could make this video shorter if I could I definitely would it makes everything about this so much easier but I think the nature of this game makes that really hard I'm definitely not the first person to try and Tackle this game and every other person that has tried to do that has had to take a substantial amount amount of time to cover even the smallest aspects of this game and because I wanted to cover everything and espouse literally all of my thoughts on this game the scripts just kept Gathering words until it started passing my longest scripts my longest writing projects becoming this Behemoth of a thing that now stands as the longest thing I have ever written full stop and it's not because I'm trying to inflate the length of the video or anything it's because I love this game I am only doing this because it's a labor of love and nothing more so before any of y'all that give video essayists [ __ ] for making really long videos come after me I tried to keep this video slim okay it's just it just kind of ended up this way this game is my favorite game of all time if you can't tell and if I haven't already said that I think I said at the beginning of this video but anyways I'm saying it again now because it's key to what I want to say in this conclusion this game changed what art meant to me it changed how I engage with literally everything because this game was the game that got me out of that super stupid anti-intellectualist hell hole that most middle schoolers dig themselves into I was that kid that would make fun of you if you thought anything had a deeper meaning than what was written on the surface but this game dug me out of that and now here I am reading super highbrow literature because that's what I find fun I study literary their animal right multi-hour long video essays that discuss the literary merits of a two-hour game the video of which is longer than the game itself this game really means a lot to me because it made me into who I am now I don't think I would have even been making gentian videos if it weren't for this game now granted this is a very 911 led to the creation of 50 Shades of Gray kind of like domino effect thing but it's still there and multiple times I have genuinely debated getting a tattoo of the three dots pattern unironically one last little thing that I want to leave you before finishing this God forsaking video back in 2020 Davey reeden like the actual guy tweeted to celebrate the fifth birthday of the beginner's guide and I absolutely love the thread that he put together and the things that he has to say about the game Five Years on here's something that I can't believe I'm saying The Beginner's Guide came out five years ago today what a weird [ __ ] game I'm amazed to found the audience that it did for years I'd been sitting on it stressing about whether people would like it I still hear from folks who say that it was a very meaningful experience for them which is extremely gratifying for me I also hear from people who say it was self-obsessed and Naval gazy I mean they're not wrong the truth is that I'll probably never make another game like this again solipsism is a Young Person's game when I think about trying to be publicly vulnerable in the same way today it just makes me feel exhausted last week I was looking through a journal that I wrote during the game's development I was considering transcribing it and posting it online for public enjoyment but as I read it I just kept thinking this is too vulnerable I don't want to share this which is exactly what the beginner's guide is in the first place funny I used to be excited about that kind of thing but age turns us outward away from ourselves and towards the world talking about myself is just less interesting to me now I'm still really glad I did it though even if to just get it out of my system I do look at all the emails people send to the email address I left in the game though I almost never respond thank you to anyone who felt compelled to write me something my favorite emails are the ones ripping mercilessly into me for stealing it honest creators of work and releasing it into the world I live for those lastly here's a quote that I almost put at the start of the game as an epigraph but I removed it at the last second because it felt too on the nose I sort of wished I'd left it in

Channel: WhaleMilk

Views: 35,446

Keywords: The Beginner's Guide, analysis, breakdown, Whale Milk, Video Essay

Id: J2HmBOorbYY

Length: 138min 42sec (8322 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2023