Beholder: Complete Edition

Beholder: Complete Edition is a fun strategy game. Its gorgeous yet subtle dystopian aesthetic illustrates a totalitarian world on the brink of revolution, with an interesting set of characters and soundtrack to boot. But while it's geared towards player agency, it can feel like you're under the thumb of the state more often than not, and that means you may feel forced to walk a path you didn't necessarily choose.

Beholder's dystopian world provides a grimly satisfying management playground to work in. It's got plenty of heart – albeit a rather scorched black one – and it forces you into making genuinely interesting moral and ethical decisions, which should be enough to see you through the tiresome grind, muddled signposting and rather flakey controls.

Beholder is a great management game where you need to decide where your loyalty lies. It plays great and looks awesome. The dark theme fits perfectly with socialist reality of the game and makes for great and somewhat dark experience.

Once the basics are understood, they're repeated ad nauseum, and while the story has some interesting elements, the monotony of the gameplay is indefensible. Few will be able to power through enough to see the many endings hidden here.

A dark game with a satirical edge, this is an addictive, fun and challenging game. The concept is unique with only a few frustrations, like a steep learning curve and sometimes fiddly controls, that stop this from being truly great. Worth checking out!

All in all, Beholder will certainly capture your attention for quite a while with its dark premise and complex relationships. Keep in mind, though, some of the controls don't work as intuitively as you'd expect, and some of the actions you have to do can be a bore. If you can see past that, this is a fantastically-designed management-sim with layers of art and complexity.

Beholder: Complete Edition is a bit too much like an exhausting job, a job that I wished I could quit after a while.

"Stalking is too repetitive to be fun."

While not everything quite comes together as likely intended the game experience is, without a doubt, unique and will challenge you in a few different directions. I would have appreciated a little more in-game direction as getting started and being sure what you need to do can be perplexing. Once you get into the routine of taking communication from “The Ministry” and working out what needs to be done it can provide few a few playthroughs (the included DLC adds an alternative situation as well) of something very different.

The visual style is certainly unique enough despite how much it may remind some of Playdead’s Limbo. The gameplay is also inspiring when first experiencing it for its mesh of strategy, management, and stealth. It’s just a shame that it gets bogged down by the economy when trying to complete key objectives. The controls are serviceable also but will take some getting used to at first.