I wasn't going to buy anything in the latest Steam Sale -- nothing really leapt out at me except games my laptop is unable to play -- but then today, 34 hours before the end of the sale, I decided to have a look down my Wish List.
Turned out there were a few Wish List games on sale for $10 and under, a couple of which for a measly $2, so I thought to myself, "Eh, why the hell not," and bought a couple of things that I'm certain I'll actually play and not have just sit there for the next ten years (or until a CME event renders us all powerless).
Today, out of my tiny haul of goods, I tried out some Beholder -- currently $2.09 AUD during the sale, normally priced at: $13.99 AUD.
✨Beholder on the Steam Store✨
We play as Carl Stein, family man and government slave. Within the first few minutes of the game I couldn't help but smirk at this one piece of dialogue.
"Many citizens still think their private life is their own business."
How remarkably accurate, amirite?
Anyway. We are Carl and we are the new landlord of this wonderful establishment! We get to poke and pry into people's private affairs, and, best of all, we get ~choices.~ I LOVE games with choice and consequences. Like in Don't Feed the Monkeys when I was accepting random parcels from the mailman instead of refusing them, got given cocaine, sold it for a few hundred thousand, then got arrested! HAH!
Yes. Choice in games is totally my jam.
Except when it's Mass Effect and you ruin your friendship with Wrex and have to shoot him on the Citadel in #3. That's never a fun choice. Never playing renegade again. 😭
But, I digress. BEHOLDER.
We get to install surveillance cameras all over the place, riffle through peoples' belongings (providing they're not home at the time), peek through peep-holes and gather information about our esteemed tenants, then ultimately choose what to do with them.
One of our tenants has an apple in their drawer. Apples are forbidden under a new directive. Shall we have this sucker arrested? Sure! Why the hell not.
While you're busy spying on your tenants and fulfilling missions for the government, sometimes your unsuspecting tenants will ask you for help and offer you quests, money, and a chance at reputation points!
As will your loving family that you're mostly neglecting in order to spy for your glorious leaders. From what little I witnessed, it looks like there are some rather significant family choices too. 😬
I'm enjoying my time with the game so far. Except for one incident where I had a worrying bug where no one was able to use the doorways to climb up the stairs ~ a google-search informed me that the only way to "fix" that bug was to start a new game. Seriously.
That was just a bit game-breaking... you kind of need to be able to travel up those stairs, and the tenants were stuck too. Ugh.
I was unimpressed, but was enjoying the game enough to give it another try and thus I started my new game and thankfully I didn't come across the error this time around.
In this particular playthrough I was a bit of a dick to everyone and very quickly got my comeuppance.
Ouch.
Anyway, for $2 you really can't go wrong with this game. Except, that aforementioned bug only fixed by starting a new game. 😏
But otherwise: it's interesting, the gameplay is intuitive with hardly a learning curve at all, I really enjoy the premise, and I'm looking forward to having another go later tonight after my son goes to bed.
Maybe I'll survive a bit longer this time! Hehe.
Until next time,
Thanks for stopping by! 🙃
Beholder! I have it on pc and Switch! It looks like a decent game, but I haven't played much past the tutorial at the moment. Got distracted by other games!
You should open it up again and give it a try! 😀 and hope that you don't get the same bug that I did, ugh.
It's pretty good for wiling the evening away!
Did you ever play 'Papers, please'?
Yes! I even had a little guide printed out for those later, stressful days where you had to keep track of so many things. 😅 Such an anxiety-inducing game.
Nice review, Its kind of strategy game I guess and looks interesting. Also The graphics looks decent.
It's a role-playing simulator 😊 it is pretty interesting, and the graphics are nice, the gameplay though isn't random so every time I click on New Game it gets a bit repetitive.
So if you start a new game which is the only way to fix the bug, won't you lose your progress so far with the game or does it save the last memory?
I had to start a brand new game which removed the current progress.
Thankfully the bug only happened early in the game, and from what I was reading it was happening in the same place for other people. Still, it was an irritating bug that I hope doesn't show up again.
Yeah it's irritating that it had to always pop up again and again but well maybe it's going to correct with time, that I don't know yet.