Beholder: Conductor

I keep a mental shortlist of games that actually make surveillance mechanics feel like decision-making rather than busywork, and Beholder: Conductor earns a provisional spot on it, with some caveats I'll get to. You play Winston Smith, a name that is absolutely not subtle, serving as senior conductor aboard the Determination Bringer, a state-owned train moving across a totalitarian country. Your day job is checking tickets, fulfilling passenger requests, and making sure the dining car runs smoothly. Your other job, the one the Ministry actually cares about, is rifling through luggage when passengers step out, filing incident reports, deciding whether to arrest, bribe, or quietly ignore the people in your carriage, and escalating covert assignments as your authority score climbs. The core loop runs on an Authority Points system that functions as your standing with the regime: earn it by reporting, lose it by crossing the wrong official or getting caught with contraband you pocketed for yourself. It is a resource management problem dressed in dystopian clothing, and for most of the run it holds together. The luggage search mechanic is where the game earns its tension. You pull items out of a compartment, check them against the permitted list, and have to return them in reverse order or face an authority penalty for disturbing a passenger's belongings. Get caught mid-search and anything in your inventory is treated as stolen. It sounds fiddly on paper and it is, but that friction is the point. The same goes for the moral architecture of individual passenger stories: help a colleague get his antidepressants or steal the medicine and watch a Russian-roulette scene play out in third class. Report the foreign ambassador or look the other way and let a peace negotiation collapse. These branch points are genuinely written, not checkbox ethical theatre. The problem, flagged loudly by veteran fans, is that the branching is shallower than it looks. Most intermediate choices funnel toward the same structural outcome, and the one decision that truly matters waits at the end. Players who replay looking for meaningfully different mid-game paths will find the illusion frays quickly. For series newcomers, Conductor is actually a reasonable entry point, which the original Beholder games never quite were. The train setting creates a natural tutorial pacing: each new carriage section unlocks access to dining cars, VIP compartments, and high-ranking officials, so complexity is gated by narrative progress rather than a front-loaded manual. The pixel art reads clearly, the atmosphere of quiet state menace lands, and the sound design, wheels on track as a constant backdrop, does real work reinforcing the sense of being an instrument inside a moving machine. The shift away from the series' signature black-and-white palette to color pixel art has divided longtime fans, some finding it too bright for the subject matter, but functionally it makes characters and carriage layouts easier to parse at a glance. The headline complaint across both critics and user reviews is length. A single run sits around five to six hours, which is fine for a narrative sim but leaves limited room for the kind of second-playthrough experimentation that made the original Beholder replayable. Unforgiving timers during certain sequences add stress that some players read as authentic dystopian pressure and others read as padding. There are also scattered bugs and loading hiccups that have been noted but, as of the game's current version, not comprehensively patched. Conductor does not replace the original Beholder, and series veterans expecting a full evolution of the formula will be disappointed. What it does offer is a focused, well-written six-hour political sim that respects the player's time even when it does not fully respect their choices. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 6 ProtonDB community reports.

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