Davey Wreden isn't done making you sad. He co-designed The Stanley Parable and directed The Beginner's Guide, and now he's heading up a new team with the aim of producing games "that are beautiful, meditative, thoughtful, and sad". So like the games he's already worked on, but with fewer jokes. Details about the next game are thin on the metaphorical, 'probably a big allegory for…
Posts tagged “Davey Wreden”
Feature: We can utilise a zeitgeist as well as anyone else
If you’ve choosed-and-adventured through Bandersnatch, the recent Black Mirror thing on Netflix, and aren’t already a fan of experimental interactive fiction: I envy you. It means you’re able to play actually good examples of interactive fiction for the first time. Sure, Bandersnatch has funny lines, surprises and scene stealing performances from Will Poulter doing a “pretty much exactly how I, the writer, talk in real…
The Beginner’s Guide creators release a JRPG about Keanu Reeves because why not
Hey everyone, look. The creators of The Beginner’s Guide have made a new game. I wonder what emotional masterpiece they’ve made this time? Let’s go take a lo-- oh. It’s an RPGMaker game about Keanu Reeves indiscriminately stabbing people. Well, you know, maybe there’s a hidden message. A deep satire on the state of the videogames industry. A worthy soliloquy hidden in the dialogue. Perhaps…
Feature: I've never meta-fiction I didn't like
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. The Beginners Guide, aka, the sad one. After the Stanley Parable warmed the innards of human animals across the world, the two creators went their separate ways. One of them resurfaced a couple of years later holding a free game with a superbly…
Feature: The Davey Parable
The Stanley Parable creator, Davey Wreden, is back two years later with a solo project, The Beginner's Guide [official site]. Released under his new development name, Everything Unlimited, this is an abstruse wander through a mysterious collection of games and game ideas, quite unlike anything else you've played. Does it work? Here's wot I think:
The Beginner’s Guide To The Beginner’s Guide – The New Game From Stanley Parable Creator
I can't imagine a more daunting development task than having to follow up on The Stanley Parable. The truly stunning meta-game was a deserved phenomenon, catapulting developers Davey Wreden and William Pugh into the heights of indie fame. A game that pulled at the threads of gaming, seeing how they'd unravel, makes for a very tough act to follow. But that's what Stanley creator Wreden…
Feature: Impossible corridors and the building as character
About a year ago I interviewed Davey Wreden and William Pugh about the architecture of The Stanley Parable but never published the article. I'd been thinking about how the game intertwines narration and level design for a while, but it was a gif which finally converted solo pondering into getting the pair on Skype. Here's what happened when Wreden and Pugh dug into the ideas…
Feature: Interview
Struggling with success is always a hard sell for empathy. It’s all too easy to dismiss such expressions with an easy, “Oh, you poor rich thing.” But it is, of course, far more complicated than that. Davey Wreden, co-creator of The Stanley Parable, has already written in detail about how phenomenon of his game has personally affected him, in an eloquent blog post last month.…
Feature: Left Or Right?
The Stanley Parable is strange. The Stanley Parable is smart, calculated. The Stanley Parable is pure chaos. The Stanley Parable is about so very, very many things - at least, until it decides to be not about them at all, often in the same breath. I'll be straight with you: reviewing this thing in any conventional fashion is more or less impossible. Yes, at heart…
Feature: discrete binary branches
“Level with Me” is a series of conversations about level design between modder Robert Yang and a level designer of a first person game. At the end of each interview, they collaborate on a Portal 2 level shared across all the sessions – and at the very end of the series, you’ll get to download and play this “roundtable level.” This is Part 5 of…