Beholder 2 (2018)

Art style aside, you can certainly be forgiven for thinking this was a different game from a different franchise. Although the same censorship-ridden controlling dystopia is still the centrepiece of Beholder 2’s world, this offers a very different experience. For starters, it replaces the side-view camera with a sort of zoomed in, diagonal one that initially feels more confusing than useful, and you now navigate through several different places rather than one single location. Movement and interface are a tad more awkward than they needed to be. Truth be told, mechanically Beholder 2 feels somewhat of a step down from its predecessor, and I wasn't gelling with it at first. But once I got acquainted with that side of things, I started looking at the game under a completely different light.

Beholder 2 is a much more encompassing game. While some of it didn’t land all that well, most did. The story is clearly more magnanimous and narratively-driven, concerned with the upper echelons of the censoring elite rather than the mundane aspects of everyday lives. You still get those - in fact the comical way the game portrays the randomness and repetitiveness of government admin jobs through pointless mini-games is close to brilliant. But the core of the narrative has clearly moved upwards, literally and figuratively. Throughout your playthrough, and fuelled by a personal pull, you are tasked with the goal of ascending to the upper floors of government power, and you do so by helping and / or incriminating both your fellow co-workers and your bosses. It’s interesting that family, while still at the centre stage of the emotional dynamic, is now basically an afterthought from a gameplay perspective. Speaking of gameplay, there’s a timid introduction of a couple of light RPG aspects such as skills, but there’s nothing timid about decision-making in Beholder 2. Most reward-driven tasks, which can give you money, items or reputation, now have a length associated with them, which adds a strategic component to the game since you only have a certain amount of hours allocated to each day.

Aside from this, the broader choice-consequence system present is also a highlight, and outcomes seem more intricate, somewhat nuanced, and more engaging. This engagement is further enhanced by Beholder’s 2 visuals, which while still maintaining a similar tone as B1, also become considerably more brutal at times, and thus more in line with the reality it attempts to portray. My one pet peeve here is with the ending scenarios. There are a ton of them, some only slightly different, others markedly different. And although I do appreciate the variety, I didn't particularly like the fact that they were more tied to how much you played the ‘collectathon’ game throughout your playthrough rather than the choices you actually made. It would've been nicer to have them more intrinsically tied up to your actual in-game decisions (though I appreciate this would've been much harder to pull).

So in the end, my time with Beholder 2 felt very different from my time with Beholder, but my level of enjoyment was nearly identical. As with the first one, the sequel’s strengths are enough to overshadow its weaknesses, and I applaud Warm Lamp for attempting to offer something fresh rather than sticking to the tried-and-true formula they had. 7.5/10