Beholder review: no fun for cogs in Orwellian machine

Clearly modelled after a grim nanny-state vision of Russia, Beholder tasks players with balancing two opposing goals: run an apartment building as a respectable landlord who is liked by his tenants, and keep your government employers happy by constantly monitoring, reporting and spying on said tenants.

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.

It is possible to build a good reputation with tenants, help them with their problems and respect their privacy. Doing well in this will grow your reputation points, which you'll need to trade on if you hope to get away with more nefarious deeds later.

Yet your livelihood depends on your keeping track of these people, and making sure they adhere to the ever-growing list of government directives, which range from bans on firearms to sanctions on certain kinds of pants. You will be punished if you fail in this task, which encourages you to secretly install cameras in smoke detectors, rummage through drawers when tenants are away and peer through their keyholes.

The game is complicated further in the grey area between the people and the ministry, where you can exploit both for your own gain, turn a blind eye in a moment of dangerous kindness, or choose to quietly help those hoping to overthrow their overlords.

Your freedom to do as you please ends up being the most damning aspect of the game, as you're forced to own each decision — whether it's refusing to blackmail a tenant when you need money for your son's tuition, or invading a tenant's home to find contraband when told you need come up with an excuse to evict them — as its inevitably dire consequence comes to pass.

The core idea ends up being loftier and more interesting than the execution of the game itself, as I found myself occasionally cursing the game for entirely the wrong reasons. Accepting requests from residents or your family always puts you under a time limit to meet their needs, even when that makes little narrative sense. At its best the system works to make you feel under pressure to deliver at all costs or accept the consequences, but often it just makes things messy.

I can see that this is the kind of game that benefits greatly from several play-throughs, as knowing how the ins-and-outs work will aid you greatly as you go. Yet after suffering for hours only to be murdered by a random resident who apparently remembered the landlord from when he was a child (a surprising twist well out of step with the tone of the rest of the game), I struggled in motivating myself to start again.

Beholder is a worthwhile game with some very interesting things to say, and at its best it puts you under constant pressure to succeed in your goals at all costs, allowing your well-meaning family man to be coerced into acts of state-sanctioned horror. Unfortunately the repetitive play and lack of any light at the end of the tunnel means I ran out of interest long before I had seen everything it had to offer.

Beholder is out now for PC (reviewed), Mac and Linux.