Beholder Review

"Always Watching"

Campaign

In this dystopian landscape you're given charge of an apartment building after the previous owner wasn't able to fulfill his duties. With owning this particular property you report directly to a minister at the government and must obey all sent commands. This includes things such as dealing with the folks that reside within the establishment to evicting tenants no matter the means. This is actually rather dark considering what you might have to do in order to keep working and in turn protect your family. It's also thrilling as you attempt to setup secret ways of monitoring the people that reside within the building and keep tabs on their daily lives. This can be done by simply watching their actions or even gathering intel by chatting with others. You'll also need to send in reports after each investigation, this will unlock new reward points and money for you to use. Points can be spent on surveillance equipment or other specials items while money can be used legally or on the black market for special goods. The spying business does start out simple at first, though I will warn it might get tedious later with a large stack of objectives for you to complete.

Gameplay

While you do play as a single character the game is presented with an overhead type viewing. You're able to zoom in close in order to inspect individual rooms or zoom all the way out to see everything that's happening. There's an easy to follow checklist journal where you keep objectives, notes and other bits of information for your job. You also have an inventory to use that you can hold items that might be essential to getting tasks done. The game does of course feature multiple options as to how you can tackle objectives and those choices come down to how you want to go about doing it. This might include grabbing certain illegal items you've been holding or finding an object that might save someone's life.

The Conclusion

Beholder is more than just a management simulator with many tough choices that will have impactful decisions on the apartment you run and the lives of everyone that resides within it. Will you take care of your family first or do you go out of the way to make sure that each tenant is cared for. Each choice has consequences and your actions will always have some sort of effect to the building or its people. Save people by finding another way or take the easy route by planting the evidence required to have the government force take care of them. There were great levels of morality explored here and it's quite dark when the totalitarian government comes knocking.

Beholder for PC
Review Code provided by Crazy Llama

Rating Overall: 8.0