Beholder

Beholder is a 2D surveillance and management game set in a bleak totalitarian state where you play Carl, a government-appointed landlord ordered to spy on his own tenants, report dissidents, and keep the regime happy. If you came expecting a city-builder or a traditional strategy title, recalibrate: this is closer to a timed resource game wrapped in a morality system. Your apartment building is the map, your tenants are the nodes, and every action you take ripples through a web of consequences that the game tracks with quiet ruthlessness. The core loop runs on tension. You sneak into rooms when tenants leave, rifle through belongings, plant bugs, and file reports to the Ministry. Meanwhile your own family has needs, money runs short, and the regime keeps piling on new mandates. Time pressure is real. Quests have deadlines, tenants move in and out, and some story beats lock permanently if you miss them. This is not a game you can pause and theorize over at leisure, which is either a design strength or a frustration depending on how you play. The decision-making rarely has a clean answer: do you report the elderly woman hiding contraband books to collect the bounty, or protect her and risk your own family? The game does not moralize at you. It just shows you the outcome, and then moves on. Mechanically, Beholder is lean. There are no build orders, no tech trees, no unit management. What it does have is a branching quest graph and a reputation economy that rewards players who treat the game like a logic puzzle. Money management matters more than it first appears. Bribes, upgrades to your apartment, and black-market items all feed into which endings you can reach. There are multiple endings, and reaching the better ones requires a level of optimization across the whole run that newcomers will almost certainly miss on their first playthrough. That first run is essentially a tutorial by consequence, which is a legitimate design choice but one worth flagging if you hate starting over. The AI governing tenant behavior is simple, not sophisticated. Tenants follow routines, react to your actions in predictable ways, and mostly serve as story triggers rather than genuinely autonomous characters. Do not come in expecting the emergent chaos of a Dwarf Fortress neighbor or a Crusader Kings vassal. The mod ecosystem on PC is limited compared to deeper strategy titles. What carries the game is atmosphere and writing. The art direction is stark and effective, the soundtrack oppressive in exactly the right way, and the moral weight of the choices lands because the writing keeps the characters just human enough to matter. For the Scout Team's usual strategy audience, Beholder sits at the lighter end of the spectrum. It is a single-session-to-learn, multiple-run-to-optimize experience that rewards players who like charting decision trees and hunting alternate outcomes. At roughly four to six hours per run, it is also one of the more time-efficient ways to get a complete narrative arc from a strategy-adjacent title. If you want 200-hour depth, look elsewhere. If you want a tightly wound game that makes every choice feel loaded and replays cleanly once you understand the systems, Beholder earns its Very Positive rating honestly.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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