Beholder

Beholder is able to make us feel guilty and stressed thanks to its atmosphere of oppression and extremely hard decisions. A great option if the player is seeking something different.

The criticisms only come because Beholder sets its sights at such lofty heights and complex issues but fails to reach them. And of course, it suffers by association with the ethically sensitive and artistically cohesive Papers Please. What it achieves, however, is an entertaining and challenging strategy game. It is just good, which is a shame because it could have been brilliant.

Beholder does an excellent job of making you feel hopeless. I was immediately infected by the game’s clouded atmosphere. I felt ready to do whatever it took to keep my household afloat. And while certain gameplay elements broke this spell, the game is worth playing. Even the most saintly players can find a little awful in themselves with Beholder.

After I got used to Beholder’s interesting setting and thick atmosphere of hopelessness I got bored with the game quickly. [01/2017, p.61]

To say that I had fun playing Beholder isn't really accurate. The game world is characterised by oppression, decisions with no good choices, objectives that just aren't obtainable without taking huge risks, and the ever-present need for creating detailed, precise paperwork. It's exhausting and sad. But if the goal of the game's developer was to provide a depressingly captivating moral accountability simulator where hardly anybody ever wins, it's a massive success.

The interior of the tenement building is a fantastic nest of voyeurism, and the game injects the awful things you’re doing with a sense of tongue-in-cheek wickedness. It may not be beauty that lives in the eye of this one, but Beholder does have some intelligent moral conundrums to levy at you. Unfortunately, the repetition and dull play leave a big hole in the middle where the game’s heart should beat.