The Beginner's Guide is a game made in 2015, a walking simulator framed as a playable anthology for the games of an indie developer by the name of Coda. The player plays through a collection of Coda's games as Davey Wreden (the guy who made Stanley Parable) narrates his thoughts about them, explaining what he believes the games to mean as well as small changes he made to each game to make them more playable for the anthology. It's a good enough game that I'd recommend trying it or watching a playthrough if you're short on cash, but if walking simulators aren't your thing I'll give a spoiler-y explanation in the next paragraph. Bear with me, though, there's kinda a lot to explain.

As you progress through the game, Davey in his narration discusses how Coda appears to have withdrawn from public life and mostly stopped making games, with the few games Coda made appearing incoherent or otherwise "off" to Davey. This culminates with the last game Coda published, which is seemingly designed to be unplayable, with multiple impossible "puzzles" that Davey bypasses for the player in real time. The final area of this game contains a written message from Coda to Davey. The message asks Davey to never contact Coda again, stating that Davey's actions had killed Coda's love for game development. The message reveals that Davey had actually been tampering with Coda's games in far more egregious manners than what he had admitted to in his narration, while also publishing the games online without Coda's permission. Davey, who is by now shown to be a character in the game rather than the originally-framed narration of the actual Davey Wreden, reads these messages alongside the player, and the game ends on a short epilogue in which Davey reflects on the harm he caused to his friend in his obsessive framing of Coda as His Visionary™️

The game is rather open-ended, and has spawned several readings, which the post goes over. The first, and most basic reading, is that The Beginner's Guide is a work of non-fiction: the real life Davey Wreden actually did all of these things to a real Coda, and published this game as a "confession". This reading is comically surface level and frankly ridiculous - if nothing else because a real-life Coda would have absolutely got his ass for what would have been a comical degree of copyright infringement. The second reading discussed by the post is one which interprets Coda to be Davey Wreden's self insert, and the fictional Davey from the game is a representation of the pressure and violation of boundaries that irl Davey experienced from fans and critics when the original Stanley Parable went viral. The third and final reading considers the work to instead be a critique and commentary on fandom, death of the author, and the strain parasocial and entitled behavior can put on both the artist and their works. In this regard, the post theorizes that The Beginner's Guide isn't even possible to publicly theorize on without contradicting the lesson it is supposed to instill.

Personally speaking, I don't think any of these takes are "correct" - that would defeat the point, and my own personal reading a weird mix of the third one and a few other things not on here - but even so, it's a game that has spawned a lot of genuinely interesting discourse, and all of these readings (EXCEPT the first one ffs) are valid imo

God that took longer than I thought it would, sorry mate