Ask your grandma for her apple pie recipe.
I couldn't. Mine died when I was little, and it never occurred to me to ask. I wish I had.
But if you ask her, I already know what she'll say:
"How much flour?"
"As much as it needs."
And there you are, pen hovering over the notepad.
The funny thing is, the recipe exists. It's in every cookbook and on every website, the same for everyone: same ingredients, same steps, same minutes. You can follow it to the gram.
And yours won't come out like hers. Not even close.
Because your grandma started with a recipe too. But one day she threw in something that wasn't in it, and another day she skipped a step that was. She tried, she got it wrong, the odd pie went in the bin. And somewhere along the way the recipe stopped being everyone's.
That's why nobody says "apple pie." You say your grandma's apple pie. Your grandma's Sunday roast. Nobody has ever said the recipe's roast.
With video games, I stayed stuck on the recipe for seven years.
I'd get stuck, open the guide and tell myself something that sounds very grown-up:
My time is worth more than my pride.
And I had plenty of pride, by the way. About how clever I was being.
The line has a point, mind you. With an hour and a half a week, nobody wants to burn an evening in front of a door that won't open. Your time is short. Nobody's arguing that.
What the line doesn't tell you is which part of the game you're saving yourself.
A guide is a recipe. It gives you everyone's dish. The levels, the music, the boss, the ending: a team designed all of that and it reaches two million people exactly the same. Follow it to the letter and you get the same pie as everyone else.
And nobody is ever going to call that one your pie.
Guide in hand, you're playing someone else's run. You never get stuck, so you never get yourself unstuck either.
The only thing that wasn't in the recipe was how you got there. The time spent stuck, the dumb idea that didn't work, the one that did. Nobody wrote that.
Everything else came with the download.
There are entire channels that make a living off you never getting stuck. What I do now when I get stuck, and when I actually do open the guide, is in chapter 6 of the book:
For when…
…you've got a whole evening and your head's still switched on: Venba. You're a South Indian mother who's just moved to Canada in the eighties, cooking from your own mother's recipe book. Which got wet, got torn, and has steps missing.
It saves at the end of every chapter, so if someone needs you halfway through, you lose ten minutes at most. Nobody hands you the missing steps: you work them out, from what Venba remembers and from what you picked up cooking the dishes before.
Not for you if what you really want is to cook: there's a lot more reading here than cooking. It's on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch.
Some recipe is going to fight you. For that moment, the one right before you look it up on YouTube, there's a whole chapter in the book: