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dkirschner's Beholder (PC)
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| [May 8, 2018 12:12:40 AM]
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This ended sooner than I thought! Orwell was longer and Beholder was shorter. Beholder is a game about Soviet style surveillance. You get put in the government job of landlord of an apartment block. You need to earn money and reputation. With reputation, you can buy security cameras, which you install in your tenants' homes. With money, you can buy repair kits to fix broken stuff and buy all sorts of goods. You can also spend these resources to pay/bribe/uncover info.
The government gives you orders to spy on and evict people. You've always got to listen for the phone to ring so you can run to your apartment and answer it. The other citizens are needy little Sims. They need medicine, or a tie, or want you to buy them a gun for protection from an abusive ex-husband, or want you to sell cans of old fish they stole, or want to get a girlfriend, etc., etc. Your family is the most needy, with a wife and two kids. The wife always needs money for bills and groceries. Your college age son needs money for books or a date, or to avoid being sent to the mines. Your small daughter gets sick, and good luck affording $30,000 to save her life!
Your task is to manage all the conflicting desires of all these NPCs while not getting yourself arrested, killed, exiled, and ideally keeping your family safe and healthy too. The gameplay loop got old fast. Run around from apartment to apartment collecting information on who has illegal goods, building dossiers on residents, and reporting all this info to the Ministry, or bribing residents for money. When residents are around, chat with them for info and take and complete tasks. Do your best to keep money and reputation rolling in so you can continue your spy work.
You will get bad endings. You will fail residents. You will have to compromise your morals and allegiances. At least all this happens on the hard difficulty, which was quite hard. I got caught stealing a lot, I was shot and killed by two different residents, I was arrested for being in debt, I was fired from my job, I was reprimanded for evicting a tenant without tact. My daughter died, my son got kicked out of college and went to work in the mines. I couldn't afford to protect either of them. It was terrible. I felt like a bad father.
And a bad neighbor. And I guess that's what Beholder is about. Being a bad neighbor and a bad father. And no one likes you.
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dkirschner's Beholder (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 17 April, 2018
GameLog closed on: Tuesday 8 May, 2018 |
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This is the only GameLog for Beholder. |
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