I can’t really form a conclusive opinion on Beholder 3, and thus I'm only rating the specific amount of time I spent with it. Because unfortunately, I came across a game-breaking bug that kept me from progressing past a certain point - the Seat at the Table mission didn’t trigger, and none of my previous saves was able to fix the issue. The only things left at that moment would be for me to restart the whole game. That I didn’t feel like doing it after 4 hours with it, however, is probably an indication of how little I was enjoying it.

Beholder 3 tries really hard to harken back to the original formula. I’m not sure if it was because the second game didn’t see the success the devs wanted or some other reason, but clearly this was a very obvious attempt to mimic what Beholder did right. The residential building management aspect is back, as is the layout, the surveillance cameras, the reports, the blackmails, the profiling, etc. The only visible difference is that, at one point, the setting branches out and you get to go to other places like you did in Beholder 2. Problem is, both the things Beholder 3 tries to iterate on, as well as the new ones it introduces, don’t quite work for the most part. There’s much more linearity this time around and very little choice to be had. The art style has been more ‘modernised’, with a cleaner, slicker look that didn’t necessarily make it better either. Music sounds less impactful and ominous. Your family is back in presence, but if in Beholder it was so involved that it could almost become a nuisance at points, here’s it’s borderline inconsequential. And speaking of family, if you rent an apartment to someone with kids, it seems you can never get them all out of the apartment at the same time, which is a bit ridiculous.

These, coupled with a few more annoyances and what felt like a backwards iteration on a competent original formula, made me not want to restart the game when the major bug came about. Looking back, I would’ve been happier with a series of two games, not three, because Beholder 3 does very little better than the ones that came before it, making it feel pointless more often than you’d want.

As a whole, however, this is a pretty interesting series, though one that will probably only be interesting for a specific set of players. You need to be into a somewhat unusual and simplistic art style. You need to be okay with some in-game tasks feeling repetitive, mundane even. You need to be into the dystopian totalitarian game vibe. And you also need to be okay with some mechanical quirks. If you are, this might certainly be an interesting franchise to check out. And hopefully, you’ll have better luck with Beholder 3 than I did.