Thanks to Curve Digital for the review code
Title: Beholder: Complete Edition
System: PS4
Price: $14.99
Release Date: 01/15/2018
Story
In this dystopian management game, you take control of a father who is now in charge of an apartment complex, right as the world is getting slapped with increasingly ludicrous restrictions and mandates from the government. Now you must manage the place and follow these silly orders, arresting tenants and making sure to stay alive and keep the family together, or defy them, while hoping the consequences won’t be too severe in the process.
There are quite a lot of choices in this game, and even your own actions can impact how tenants behave and the story branches. I can’t say any of it makes me want to find out the whole secret behind the society itself, but it definitely made me want to at least see how certain characters would react and how far I could push things before hitting a brick wall. Yep, it’s one of those kinds of adventure titles where too many wrong moves can create an unwinnable state.
Presentation
Beholder’s art style is seemingly rather generic at first, with every character looking like a weird, shadowy blob of sorts, yet with barely enough features in their shape or size to tell them apart. The vibe of the entire game is very, very dark (because based on the setting, why wouldn’t it be) and the same dull colors span your entire apartment complex, with an equally dull UI.
Oddly enough, I found Beholder’s look to grow on me after a while, with the characters eventually being memorable enough that I was able to quickly recognize who was who even with the shadowy design of the models, and the weird, rounded look on them helps to make an otherwise dire world a bit sillier. The characters also speak in a goofy gibberish language, though they barely have much variety and often will repeat the same vocal line any time you talk to them. It also manages to look incredibly funny when speeding up time and seeing a bunch of NPCs zoom all around the building as you wait around for the next task, rule or directive to be issued.
The music on the other hand, is very limited. Yeah, the main theme you hear during the game is fitting of the dreary tone of the world, but it goes on and on and on, which honestly feels intentional in the sense that it will drive you insane. That doesn’t mean there’s just one song during the game, as music cues will kick in depending on the situation, whether that be from the police barging in, getting spotted by a tenant, or a new ban being issued that you have to follow.
There are a few cutscenes in the game too, usually for the endings you’ll encounter, and these are voiced by a narrator who sounds rather stiff in their execution, with the tone of the spoken dialogue not quite matching what I’d envision these situations to warrant. Still, they get the job done and look rather nice.
Gameplay
Your main goal in this game is to keep your entire family alive and survive the increasingly insane world you work for, as the Ministry continues to issue ordinance after ordinance banning absurd things such as singing, records, and even books as you progress through time. Your main goal is to open the apartment to new neighbors, befriend them, and then document their every move either via examining their actions in person or by planting surveillance material within their rooms.
You can even barge in yourself when they aren’t home, dive through their stuff and take notes on every rule-breaking or habit-causing item you find, which leads to the main way you’ll be getting money; reporting and evicting tenants, or blackmailing them. Sometimes the ministry will hate a certain person and want them out no matter what, or sometimes there’s someone that’s just plain annoying or in need of being sacrificed to the police in order to earn the reward money. Or you could just be cruel for no reason, plant illegal items in their home and report them for owning said illegal item. You can even do this to your own family, if you’re feeling particularly heartless, but the main way to “win” the game is to try and keep them alive throughout the coming months as you discover more about the unfolding nature of the world and a rising resistance, while managing their needs and tasks.
Your wife may need funds for bills, while your son wants money to stay in a college and not get sent off to a mine. Your daughter will get sick and will need all sorts of work to stay alive as the government bans more and more medicine, and money is not easy to come by in this game. Even if you do something daring like trying to rob everyone and pawn off all their items, you’ll be nowhere close to affording every single task the game throws at you, so befriending neighbors, helping them with their issues and finding out how to do all that while keeping the ministry happy is the key to survival.
Still, you will hit a brick wall sooner or later if you aren’t prepared, either from too many members of your family dying, or you getting fined due to the events of the main story or actions you took earlier in the playthrough. If you run out of money from a fine, you’re arrested and the game ends. You also build reputation points over time from doing good deeds, and these can be used to bribe officers or neighbors and avoid getting in risky situations, as if a neighbor is too angry at you, they can resort to lethal force and cause a game over that way.
As the months continue, a lot more tasks get thrown at you back to back, which makes the multitasking really, really hectic if you want to do as good as possible. Even I was unable to really get that far into the fall period, without realizing some mistakes with earlier reports I made cost me enough money to make paying mandatory bills and fines unavoidable. You really have to monitor these tenants closely and make the most out of them to save your own skin, and while it is an engaging loop I enjoyed, those brick wall moments would lead to frustration, and while you can reload one of the many checkpoint saves the game makes during your playthrough and go back in time, it can still be a slog to replay similar events and wait out the clock for the next day to come. Even speeding up time with the triangle button can be a bit of a wait.
Last but not least, is the reason this is the “Complete Edition”, which comes in the form of a prequel campaign. I didn’t touch this one too much, but it’s basically a story explaining how the owner of the apartment before you moved in got control of it and eventually had their downfall. It’s more short and simple than the main campaign, so while a nice bonus, I found the main game to be the main course I wanted to continue.
Conclusion
For a game that has been sitting in the corner of my queue for way too long, Beholder is a fine game. It does get a bit repetitive very quickly, but there’s a satisfaction to repairing the apartment and pushing through to see the sort of crazy neighbors or mandates thrown at you next. The branching paths and making sure everything is OK and you follow the rules is also pretty tense, and trying to manage the best possible scenario for your family is really, really tough, even on the easiest setting. It’s easy to get an ending, but whether it’ll be a good one is up to you and requires a lot of work, making this a pretty satisfying effort once you figure out the next roadblock in your way.
The presentation as a whole is fitting and helps make the morbid situations in this game a lot less intimating, and outright funny at points if you end up throwing your hands up in the way and wanting to deliberately cause chaos. Still, as a core gameplay loop, this game is just OK, and is one I recommend playing in bursts rather than trying to barrel through tasks for an hour or more on end. It must have clicked for others way more than it did me though, since we’re at the third game having been out by the time this review is finally live. Even if you do like the loop though, prepare for a lot of trials to get that golden ending, and a lot of waiting.
I give Beholder: Complete Edition a 6 out of 10,