Inspired by the ongoing conversations about IF for beginners, here’s my latest hot take:
The best IF for any given beginner is whatever game has narrative and/or gameplay elements that make that specific person’s brain light up, and that matters a lot more than how hard or easy the game is, how much it holds your hand, how much it resembles more mainstream video games, how much a parser game is going to teach you skills you need to play other parser games, or any of the other things that get brought up in these discussions.
I would bet that if you polled people who got into IF in the post-commercial-parser-game era, most people’s “the game that got me into IF” wouldn’t be one that was explicitly For Beginners, and a lot of them would probably be considered actively beginner-unfriendly. Finding a game that grabs your brain just right is usually the thing that motivates someone to not only finish a game but go “wow, I’d like to see more stuff like this”, and whether the game is hard or even unfair has less bearing on that than most people would expect, I think.
(Lest people think this seems parser-game-centric because choice games usually aren’t that hard or unfair, I also got into VNs back in the early '00s via games that had a lot of un-signposted sudden death or “haha guess what, that seemingly inconsequential choice you made at the beginning of the game locked you out of the best ending!” situations.)
Which is not to say that I’m not in favor of tutorial modes, QoL features, game design that strives to be as fair as possible, or anything like that, just that I feel like arguing about whether or not a specific game is a good one to recommend to nebulous, unspecified Beginners is kind of futile because what’s good for beginners in theory has little relation to what games beginners are actually getting into.