Beholder Reviews

Du bist Hausmeister, Spitzel und moralisches Wrack in einer Person. Du hörst Leute ab, durchwühlst Wohnungen und entscheidest ständig, ob du ein guter Mensch sein willst oder lieber deine Familie ernährst. Am Ende sind alle unglücklich, aber immerhin hast du die Miete bezahlt

It's like Papers Please but way more serious on political stuff, still pretty good!

传达的内容十分阴暗，画面也灰蒙蒙的，很有现实意义，主题也很有意思，不错的游戏。但是玩多了有点心理阴暗和内向

The game is alright... It gets pretty boring at times, especially when all of the tenants are home and there is nothing to do. I didn't feel very stressed playing and when each family member died I honestly did not care as there is barely any character backgrounds. I don't think it's a bad game but it isn't very exciting either.

This game's a tense dystopian gem where you're the landlord in a totalitarian nightmare, spying on tenants, planting bugs, stealing stuff, and deciding who to rat out to the Ministry to keep your family alive. I put in 7.3 hours—enough to finish the main story (usually around 6 hours) and see a couple different endings—and it had me hooked the whole way with those brutal choices that actually matter. Gameplay revolves around daily survival: fix the building, scrape together cash for meds and food (or watch your wife and kids get worse), deal with ridiculous government orders like banning certain books or forcing people out, and sneak into apartments to dig up dirt. Every tenant has their own story—a sick grandma, a rebel with hidden flyers, a family barely hanging on—and what you do with them changes everything. Help them quietly? Blackmail for quick money? Report them and cash the state check? One bad call, and it's game over—reload from the last day saved. It's got that Papers, Please + This War of Mine vibe, but with a darker, more personal edge and multiple endings depending on how far you bend (or break) your morals. What kept me playing: the atmosphere is spot-on—creepy, hopeless, with those weird blobby characters mumbling in garbled voices, constant time pressure, and random events that can screw you over. The best moments are when a "kind" choice blows up in your face, like trusting someone who later betrays you. Pros: super replayable for different paths and achievements (there are 60 of them, like getting your family out safely or straight-up killing a tenant); sharp writing about surveillance and power without being preachy; cheap and runs perfectly. Cons: early game can feel grindy for money (steal everything you can); controls are a bit clunky for precise sneaking; some text translations are rough, but it kinda fits the broken dystopian world. If you like story-heavy indies with real consequences and short-but-impactful playtime, this is a strong pick. The Blissful Sleep DLC is worth grabbing too for extra backstory. Great for a focused weekend session. Recommended 9/10

First I'll say this concept is excellent. The gameplay is interesting and engaging. It was rewarding developing time saving and resource management techniques to handle unexpected challenges. The reason I would not recommend this to others is because of how needlessly frustrating the plot is, and how inflexible the solutions are. I have played it through maybe four or five times without any meaningfully satisfying conclusion (maybe that is the point?). The last play through I did was the most irritating. You can work incredibly hard to make your family's lives better and be ruthlessly punished for it. Maybe there's some dark humor there that's hard to see. However, items have essentially zero secondary use if they are part of a fixed plot line. I was able to save a bomb meant for one tenant that I planted in another tenant's apartment, whom I was coerced into agreeing to kill, and nothing came of it. Weird bugs that don't make sense, like evicted tenants staying in their rooms and randomly acting as shroud clearing beacons when they mill about in the basement with their daily routine. Just overall confusing and frustrating; it's not meant for a casual or enjoyable experience. I personally hate relying on guides to navigate or even understand what the game is supposed to be showing the player. I can't stand reloading save points just because I felt so cheated by bad explanations, poor UI/UX that only appears one time for one specific mission. I bought the patient-gaming package, so I can only hope that later installments of the title franchise do not make the same mistakes, because as a novelty it's great, but truly poor execution when measuring net value.

At the beginning I struggled a bit with this game, it took me a while to understand how it works. After that I had so much fun playing this game. It turns into a blackmail-simulator very fast, if you want to keep your whole family alive and it provides a very interesting insight into how people can behave in desperate situations.

This game is very unique and an interesting challenge. It took a while to figure out some of the mechanics that weren't explained fully in the tutorial but once I got it down, it was pretty simple. I considered playing through it at least one more time to see different outcomes but I felt that overall I had gotten all that I wanted out of the game with one play through. However, I can see the game having fairly good replayability at least 2-3 times due to how much your choices affect events and how quickly the game plays.

The character designs and apartment layouts are excellent. The whole game feels like a good book—at certain points in the story, it made me feel a bit guilty.

I was shot buy a fat guy because i blamed him for something that was 100% his fault. This game is good, even though there is almost zero purple in it