The Beginner's Guide
Fair · Narrative · 2015
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $9.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 1.5h
- Value
- $6.66/hr
- Reviews
- 88% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 4 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
The Beginner's Guide is a narrative video game from Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable. It lasts about an hour and a half and has no traditional mechanics, no goals or objectives. Instead, it tells the story of a person struggling to deal with something they do not understand.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.49. That was June 2018. 52 discounts in the 11 years on record. They run about 50 percent off, roughly 9 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 9 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 10 percent on value. It is pricier than 68 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 88 percent. Among the games that feel like it, The Stanley Parable ($14.99, scores 62) beats it on value, while it beats Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs ($19.99, scores 20).
16 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written July 2022 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 87 percent of the 13,902 reviews written there were positive, against 88 percent overall, and those are 70 percent of everything written about it.
Players
7 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
i will never be the same. i am so glad i played this, and so sad i will never play it for the first time again.
Left me feeling a little emotionally fragile. I went in blind and completed 1.6 hours in a single session. I related to the story and the feelings. Slow game, gripping story. 👍🏻
to share oneself with another, through any medium, is a mirror that reflects both ways. to see is to be seen, to know is to be known, and to hope is to strive. art is a method of understanding our collective soul, to hate your art is to hate the world. having love and patience with everything will change how you perceive the world infinitely.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic), achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
The Beginner's Guide scores 59/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/303210/the-beginner-s-guideThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.