Beholder
Intense overall intensityWhat's in it
The plot depicts life under a totalitarian regime: denunciations that lead to arrests and executions, families broken apart, and a sick child who can die without medicine.
The player breaks into tenants' apartments, plants listening devices, steals belongings, and can fabricate or plant evidence to frame residents for reporting.
Alcohol and prohibited contraband appear as items the player can find, trade, and plant in apartments to incriminate tenants.
A tenant takes their own life as an event within one of the story's branches.
Tenants are beaten, arrested, and taken away or executed by state agents, rendered in a flat black-silhouette art style with no blood or visible wounds.
Who can reach your kid
What it is
Beholder is a dystopian adventure and management game in which you play Carl, a landlord installed by a totalitarian state to spy on the tenants of an apartment building. Gameplay revolves around bugging apartments, searching residents' belongings while they are out, building profiles, and reporting anyone the regime deems a threat. The player commits routine crimes — breaking and entering, theft, planting contraband, and blackmail — and choices ripple into arrests, executions, and broken families. The subject matter is bleak: oppression, denunciation, euthanasia, a child who can die without medicine, and a tenant whose story can end in suicide, all told through a stark black-silhouette art style with no graphic detail. There is no sexual content, no online play, and no purchases.
How it's framed
The game presents surveillance and betrayal as a running series of moral dilemmas rather than as things to celebrate. Following the state's orders and denouncing innocents brings money and safety, while protecting tenants carries personal risk, and the multiple endings turn directly on which choices the player makes. The oppression and its human cost are depicted plainly and critically, framing the regime as something the player is complicit in rather than rewarded for enjoying.
Details
- Developer
- Alawar Stargaze (Warm Lamp Games)
- Publisher
- Alawar
- Released
- Nov 9, 2016
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