I, dear comrade, am loyal to the party. All the fine things I have like my family and job are generous gifts from the Great Leader. This is why I take it upon myself to spy for the State and deliver reports of all the possible wrongdoings that my neighbors commit. Beholder 3 puts you in the shoes of Frank, a family man who is arrested after an illegal program on his computer is discovered. Frank is fortunate however, instead of being shipped off to the mines, he’s sent to be the landlord at an apartment complex. The catch is, he now works for the government and spies on his neighbors.
Those who have played the first two games will understand the gameplay loop from the word “go” but for the uninitiated, Beholder games are two-fold. First, the game tasks you with managing resources and spending your honey wisely. You acquire more funds by reporting your neighbors for strange infractions and accomplishing menial tasks. You could also blackmail your neighbors if you’re so inclined. However, it can be hard to find renters when you keep shipping tenants off to prison.
The second aspect is decision-making. You’ll have to decide if letting a sick child suffer is permissible if possession of the medicine is illegal. The main decisions you’ll make will be around how best to sleuth and schmooze information out of your tenants. You may have a paranoid rebel who never leaves his apartment, so how will you plant a camera to spy on him? Or you might break into a tenant’s apartment while they’re sleeping and make note of what they have stashed away in their sock drawer. It’s up to you to choose what to do with this information and how you acquire it. Just don’t get caught and don’t misfile a report as both will have consequences, mainly financial.
Frank’s family is going through this transition from middle class to “barely scraping by.” Your daughter may act out and your wife will want to have harder conversations with you, and you won’t always make the “right” decision. These and other dark themes set the stage for this oppressive and totalitarian world you now find yourself living in. Luckily, the visual presentation is far gentler and whimsical than the subject matter.
Somber music swells as you make any major decisions, and you’ll see police brutalize tenants before their arrest. It’s played out in a comical and cartoony fashion to ensure the grim nature of what you’re doing is still rewarding. Character dialogue is spoken in nonsensical language with subtitles similar to the Sims. Characters are displayed as solid black silhouettes with expressive eyes and a few added features. It’s an effective way to keep the mood light-sh while you report a single mom for giving her sick kid penicillin.
This loop is fun, and you feel like such a small cog in this crushing world. At any moment I felt like the phone could ring and I’d be asked to do something terrible and be faced with yet another uncomfortable decision and reminded that it’s better than the mines. Unfortunately, this fun was severely undercut by some major stability issues.
My PS5 has crashed around 8 times playing this game. I am currently stuck with what I believe is a broken quest loop where no new tenants will move into my building, and I cannot progress the story. I like to think that my version of Frank will just live forever happily with his family, but in truth, this is a very unstable version of the game. I really have to emphasize buyer-be-ware of how rough this is on the PS5.
Also, it’s important to note that there are some localization issues with the dialogue. Sometimes it feels like phrases are just run through a translator and plopped into the game. Within the first hour, I had already spotted a handful of incorrect verbs and strange sentence structures. It’s really surprising as the game was released on PC nearly a year ago. One would think that is well enough time to fix the easy stuff like a written dialogue mistake.
I am still scratching my head as to how an established franchise that was praised for the first two games is mishandled in its third entry. Upon further inspection, Warm Lamp Games developed the first two Beholder games in the series. It was Paintbucket Games that developed the 3rd game on PC and Toplitz Productions handled the PS5 port. This is editorializing, but at the very least this is far removed from those who originally built Beholder 1 and 2. I’m wondering if a previous publisher had rites to shop the game out to a studio who didn’t give it the TLC its original developer would have given it. It’s no wonder this version has some significant stability issues and needs some updates before it’s worth the $19.99 asking price.
