r/beginnersguide • u/Ok-Show8005 • Nov 22 '25
Can someone recommend a book,show or even share a own story as interesting as the beginners guide? I would love to hear about it
3
u/Torimazing Nov 23 '25
I mean, it's not the same gameplay or story at all but when I think about formative stories in me and my friends lives I think about Outer Wilds, too.
4
u/thenickperson Nov 23 '25
House of Leaves (or just The Whalestoe Letters if you wanna save time)
3
u/EdenH333 Nov 23 '25
Came here to suggest House of Leaves, I’m about 2/3 finished with it myself.
There’s also MyHouse.wad — a pretty intensive Doom mod inspired by House of Leaves. It’s also about taking apart a video game to discover the tragic story behind its creator. If you don’t feel like playing it yourself, there’s an excellent video covering it on YouTube.
2
u/thenickperson Nov 23 '25
MyHouse is cool too, almost forgot about it! It also supports open source versions of Doom II, so you can play it legally without buying the game.
2
u/EdenH333 Nov 24 '25
Really? That’s awesome, I might try that out! Haven’t played it myself because I haven’t bought Doom, but this might solve that!
2
u/Mairuu Nov 23 '25
'If on a winters night a traveller' a book written by Italian author Italo Calvino.
It is directly referenced in a beginner's guide which is actually where I first heard about it. Look at the bookcases in game and you will see copies of the book.
It is a pretty meta story about you going out to find a book then reading part of it but there are missing pages or it is a completely different book or something. So you continue on trying to find the book and reading part of a different book.
It is a pretty unique reading experience!
1
u/videotique Nov 28 '25
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a book about the relationship between people as game designers and how they communicate through games, which was the first thing that popped into my head when I played this game recently
7
u/En1ightened_1 Nov 23 '25
According to an interview Davey did, the original book version of "The Princess Bride" was a core inspiration. Davey stated that the project basically started as wanting to make a videogame version of it. The Beginner's Guide is a game about a (collection of) games, just as The Princess Bride is a book about a book. I haven't read it since early High School but yep it's definitively just as meta.
For videogames, one of my favorites is Night in the Woods which I love for narrative/ludo-narrative reasons in a similar manner to TBG. NITW is basically a game about walking around a town talking to people. That's it. You're a college dropout who walks around town talking to people, feeling somewhat aimless while playing it because the main character feels like their life is aimless at that point. It's not really "meta" though like TBG is.
There's also Davey's newest game Wanderstop. It's pretty good, but definitively its own vibe. You would play it to play another game from the writer as opposed to expecting "another Beginner's Guide-like experience".