Beholder (2016)

I got three of these games and i'm eager to see the series evolve. Some aspects of this one are a bit rough. I could never really get used to the UI (so hard to click things at times) or the wonky rolling cam that they made roll down at a diagonal angle to the left (but not the right?) when panning.... The dialogue in this is good, but not very well written (maybe its deliberately broken Russian English at times?) There's a LOT of rather good black humor in this (as might be expected) but what I loved was how it feels like Fallout Shelter, meets The Sims meets... chaos, lol. People hang themselves, the sob themselves to sleep at night. they murder or they commit crimes and all sorts of things. Spying on your tenants is pretty amusing and between whats going on inside the tenement and outside it's just constantly chaotic. They tried to gamify this with a kind of timer mechanic that paces very fast and makes it way too tough to handle anything though. It's absolutely impossible to do everything you must and actually earn enough money for your family due to the challenges this game throws at you. For me, this kind of ruined some of the fun, and i fired up cheat engine to max out money and rep and it was STILL pretty much impossible to do what needs to be done. (I managed to get the 'good' ending but not with all family members)

Some really clever quest concepts and character backgrounds of the tenants themselves. The game clearly was inspired by Papers Please, and references it towards the end as you look to leave the country (one possible ending) the content and narrative of the game is very similar as well as throwing you catch-22's constantly to the point of things feeling like they are going to collapse.

Long live Dear Leader!

Probably one of the most depressing and thoughtful dystopian worlds, where we assume the role not of an ordinary citizen, but of an element of the government machine.

The variability and immersiveness of the game are very developed, although most of the time it seemed to me that its pace was too fast.

The visual style and sound design are very stylish and unique, which I would also like to mention.

The first Beholder is a complete homage - if a slightly tongue-in-cheek one - to Orwell’s 1984, down to its timeline. You are basically put in charge of managing an apartment complex, which means spying, helping, manipulating, blackmailing, profiling and/or reporting on your fellow tenants. It’s a single location game, and you have access to the entire building complex from a side-view perspective. There’s a very simple yet appealing noir art style to Beholder, one that sets the tone for the entire game and that often reminded me of This War of Mine (the music, though a bit repetitive, contributes to this as well). The gameplay is initially addictive, theoretically simple and deceptively stressful: because you are often pressed for time in between quests, and the sub-stories get more intricate as you go, having to manage everything can feel a bit overwhelming at certain points. However, this can also work well in the way of build-up, which I suppose realistically reflects a similar real-life scenario, one where you're expected to turn in results or have things turn out badly for you.

The narrative intricacies were probably what surprised me the most about Beholder. There is a really interesting mix of silly (directives) and depressing (plot) moments anchored in its dystopian world, with genuinely surprising, gut-wrenching mini-climaxes that turn the whole experience up a notch. Your family plays a big part in the emotional hook, and even if there are some inconsistencies in some of the minor plots, the game does an overall good job of weaving in engrossing sub-stories. The fact that you’re able to extract different endings from the game, which are mainly dependent on the choices you make, only adds to elevate the decision-making process, even though not every ending seems to flow as a natural consequence of your decisions.

Beholder can feel a bit clunky and certainly repetitive the longer you play it, but it’s not a lengthy experience, and the gameplay loop does hook you. I definitely enjoyed my time with it, and jumped into the sequel with anticipation. 7.5/10

So, I played this game a while back, and got terribly frustrated and put it down, thinking I might come back to it. I decided to look into tips for the game when I went back to pick it up, and eventually I realized... The only way I could enjoy the game was to cheapen the entire narrative.

The game doesn't force you into vaguely difficult choices, it demands you to know what's coming ahead of time, and then be an asshole (by blackmailing and screwing with your tenants) or it kills your family.

Every set of tips and tricks I read wasn't about difficult choices, it was about optimizing the way you screw your tenants. 'Don't send these people away, because if you do, you can't continue to blackmail them!' Except maybe under the very specific circumtances in which you do exactly the right quests in exactly the right order and exploit game mechanics (don't talk to your son to prevent his storyline from progressing!) to accomplish anything.

At that point, I decided that I didn't want to play 'asshole landlord simulator', where I either save-scummed to a semblance of victory, or used guides to suck the fun out of the game, and promptly uninstalled. One less game in my backlog.