After this you write the crime up at your desk, file your report, and watch as police come to drag him away, leaving behind a distraught wife. You can catch him committing a minor, harmless crime easily enough by spying through the peephole in his door, or you can take illegal goods, either by buying them from a merchant or stealing them from another resident’s room, and plant them in his apartment while he’s out. For example, one early mission focuses on evicting a man in your building, potentially separating him from his family. There are multiple ways to attend to each mission, but going for the ‘morally right’ option won’t always result in a ‘happy’ ending, which is an interesting, albeit flawed, approach. You can dictate the pace somewhat by choosing when to start certain missions, but striking a balance between being too busy and being bored can be difficult. Unfortunately, these moments can often be separated by long lulls, or frustrating moments where you need to speak to a resident who has gone off-site for the day. This is the ‘people literally run down the street screaming sometimes’ brand of dystopia.īeholder is at its best when there’s enough going on to overwhelm you, when time is ticking down on an important mission as you desperately look for ways to make money to buy a mission-critical item or you need to choose between two different objectives that aren’t compatible with each other. Completing the tasks handed out by the omnipotent ‘Ministry’, while also fulfilling requests from both your building’s residents and the political dissidents who will occasionally contact you, means making choices about your priorities, right down to which missions you follow and ignore. Missions and objectives (often with time limits) pop up as you play, and you need to please the powers-that-be as they monitor your performance while also keeping your family happy and healthy. Self-preservation is an important part of the game, but Carl and his wife come across as fairly unpleasant people (in my second playthrough Carl’s wife left him because he didn’t buy her a radio), and while there’s an imperative to protect your children their missions mostly boil down to accruing and then spending large sums of money. The nature of this game’s totalitarian state is well established, and you learn a lot about how its people are treated and how arbitrary its oppression is, but there’s little sense of what you’re meant to take away from it. It strikes an odd tone, and it’s hard to know how you’re meant to respond to the game’s bleakness. The game makes you feel simultaneously powerful and weak: as landlord you can save or ruin lives with your interventions, but you’re still ultimately beholden to the laws and regulations of the state.īeholder has a dark sense of humour, but its attempts at levity never really land. The game is set entirely within this single complex other characters can come and go, but Carl is drugged up on pills that prevent him from sleeping and forced to focus all of his attentions on the six apartments under his control. You click your way around the tenement, talk to the people who live there, sneak into their apartments while they’re out to search for contraband and install hidden cameras, and maintain the building’s upkeep. You’re presented with a cross-section of the building, which consists of six apartments and the basement where Carl lives with his family.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |