While this is most certainly a deliberate choice, it doesn’t help the cold I am left with. I feel I’ve been delivered an essay in novel form I haven’t actually really connected with the chess-piece characters and there is no beating heart to it. Playing Beholder through to its conclusion, of which there are multiple, feels similar to reading 1984. There are fleeting moments of satisfaction to be had when small goals are met, but these don’t really resonate – they aren’t given the chance to. The main problem here is that while what you’re doing is food for thought – to a degree – it isn’t actually all that fun. They make people out of little smudges in the dark. There are some touching moments: finding your daughter’s lost teddy bear, bringing some fancy soap home for your wife – these bring warmth into the shuttered dank of the rooms. The color has been bled from every scene the skies overhead are iron-grey and the tenants scuttle to and fro like insects. The art style funnels the harrowing subject matter into a cartoon, softening some of the bleaker blows. I started to feel like Gerd Wiesler in The Lives of Others after a while, detached but obsessed by those caught in my web. Of course being Gerd Wiesler wouldn’t really be all that fun, would it? Beholder takes this central gameplay idea – that of making a series of small bureaucratic choices which affect the lives of ordinary people – and infuses it with a sense of lived-in claustrophobia. If you’ve played Papers Please then you’ll have an idea of what to expect here.
You may be able to afford tablets for your sick daughter, but now you can’t afford to pay off your blackmailer. You might have more money right now, but someone may have been undeservedly beaten and arrested, or worse. But, ultimately, it all ends up the same way.” Everything we do here is a stall we’re just trying to keep the game going – that’s it. There’s a scene in which Dr Cox breaks down what they do as doctors for JD it culminates in him saying, “It’s about keeping the ball game going. It happened fairly early on for me and when it did it reminded me of a line from Scrubs.
There’s a numb feeling that washes over you after a time. From there it progresses to seedier pastures: the blackmailing, the reporting, the abuse of power, and eventually far worse. It is mechanical: mousing over objects, rifling through desks, clicking through conversations hungry for scraps of information you can use. You start to slip into a pleasing rhythm when you play the game the meat and drink of what you’re actually doing is steeped in the minutiae of the mundane. Every action you make results in both a positive and negative outcome. You’ll be ordered to bust a tenant for breaking some state rule (these come trickling in on your news feed and grow increasingly bizarre), but an opportunity might arise to blackmail them for more money than you’d otherwise make – this comes in handy for things like paying for your son’s university text books or a bottle of whiskey to soothe your mounting stress. Your mission as a totalitarian state-installed civil servant is to surveil your tenants, be it by bugging their apartments, peeping through their keyholes, or probing them for information in what they think is casual conversation. You are the manager of a tenement building in what feels like 1980s East Germany. When you plug one hole, you can hear another drip straight away. Beholder is a game that revels in this feeling, over and over again. If you don’t go and investigate it then it’ll only nag at you. Drip, drip, drip… You know that alarming feeling when you hear a drip? Someone hasn’t turned a tap firmly enough, or the shower hasn’t been shut off properly.
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