So we all have a little voyeur in us, right? In this indie game you need to spy on your tenants and make life changing decisions!
BEHOLD, beholder is here!
Too cringy? Sorry. Anyway, beholder is a game where you can let your inner spy out and sneak into other tenants apartments to collect evidence and steal their stuff! It’s a really unique and fun concept but is it actually good?
Your name is Carl and in the beginning of the game you are appointed to be the new warden of a 3 story apartment building. Together with your family, you move to the basement of this complex. In this forgotten and forsaken land you are lucky to have a job which provides for you family but it comes with a price. You need to report anything tenants do so you can earn some money. But what do we do when they are behaving perfectly legal? Well, we trap them and report them anyway! *evil laughter*
You can use EVERYTHING!
Your job is to report everything your tenants do to the ministry and if it’s something illegal they will get arrested and you will be rewarded. To fulfill your job you can install security camera’s into their apartments so you can see every move they do, and when they leave you have your keys to enter any apartment and search/steal anything you want! The ministry gives you jobs to complete and special people to follow for extra rewards, these should always be looked at first.
I just love it how you can give a gift to somebody and let them have arrested minutes later because the thing you gave was an illegal object. The opposite is also true, sometimes you get an offer or a bribe from a tenant and it’s best to milk out some money before you report them, or don’t report them at all and start blackmailing!
All this would be great, there is just one thing missing.
When I first heard about this game I was pretty excited, but after the first 20 minutes, it gets boring. Yea I’m sorry if it seemed like I was leading you on. It’s a bit like communism, the idea is great and it looks good on paper but it’s a flop when put into practice.
Sometimes you get “hard” decisions but are they really that hard? I mean it’s just a game and you can’t make me “feel” the feels when there are no consequences. I mean like : OH NO my son is not going to college if I don’t give him 20k in the next 70 hours. This happens in the first 10 minutes of the game, well Carl may know his son BUT I DON’T. Or the game tries its best to give you second thoughts about reporting the old lady who just bought a new jeans, TOO BAD LADY jeans are against the law, TO JAIL YOU GO!
No but seriously, it gets old pretty fast and it just doesn’t have that vibe to keep you playing, or maybe it’s just me because the game looks a bit too much on my IRL job.
Conclusion:
Not that easy to give a solid point here because it’s a so-so game. I liked the idea and some aspects of the game, but at the same time, it gets boring fast. There is no real strategy or satisfying rewards or bad consequences when you do something. So would I recommend this game to others? It depends, I know for a fact a buddy of mine will love this game but for me personally, maybe not. It’s not that expensive so you won’t go broke on a bad gamble. So I would give this an average score of 2.5/5!
