One of the quietly unexpected stars of this project has been the Beholder series. While I wouldn’t list them as my favourite games of all time, the first and second Beholder games do a delightful job of humanising autocracy and dystopia, and of making the bureaucracy that fuels them a more nuanced one. Rather than a faceless void into which people disappear, the Beholder series fills a similar niche as the film Der Leben des Anderns of exploring why someone would become a party informant, and what that actually means for them and their lives. They’re good games, and I don’t recommend them enough, given my fondness for them.

Beholder: Conductor is a spin-off from this series, tracing the same themes of making decisions in a dictatorship, though with a new setting and characters. Telling a compelling story about moral ambiguity and the nature of survival under crushing authoritarianism should be easy for a series that has so far excelled at doing exactly that.

It isn’t. Beholder: Conductor is linear, shallow, and worst of all, just dull.

Every good train has a cabaret car.

Beholder: Conductor follows the journey of Winston Smith (yes, that is the character’s actual name), a newly minted conductor aboard the Determination Bringer, a train bound for the far frontiers of your dystopian country. Winston is responsible for checking tickets, seeing to passengers’ needs, and spying and reporting on them to the ever-watchful government.

Again, this should be a story that works. As with every game in the series, there is room for a game like this to play with moral ambiguity and the need for survival. In practice, however, the game provides few opportunities to explore this. The first half of the game, for example, centres less on moral ambiguity, and more on whether to steal from some characters to benefit others. A character would, for example, offer me a significant amount of money to steal two halves of an item from two suitcases. I could abuse my power and do this, or I could…not. Each decision had consequences, but those consequences only mattered for which Steam achievement I wanted, and left the story as soon as the passengers did.

This pattern of ostensible, but ultimately shallow choice repeated throughout the game, with my actions mattering not so much to outcomes as they did to how I as a player was feeling. Even this, though, didn’t lead to a roleplay experience, but rather the sense that my actions were just tasks, punctuating the time between train stops with brief spurts of excitement before the tedium of waiting for something to happen set back in.

Which, I suppose, is how a job works, so I guess it’s not that far off.

This section even has a timer so I can watch my life tick down!

Describing Beholder: Conductor’s gameplay as “tedious” does not fully capture the frustration that is this game’s gameplay. Much of the gameplay revolves around the train’s passengers and their needs. Upon boarding, Winston inspects each passenger’s ticket, chats with them about any needs they might have, and fulfils those needs if able. As with most point and clicks, these needs centre around a specific item or action, with Winston either needing to collect a specific item, place a specific item, or have a specific conversation. Filling the time between passengers arriving, Winston can observe passengers or rummage through their luggage and file reports about their activities, or have them arrested.

The inevitable outcome of this gameplay loop, then, is that the majority of the player’s time is spent either waiting for a passenger to leave their cabin so their possessions can be rifled through, or filling out forms. When all forms have been filled out and all passengers examined, there is nothing left, but the slow progression of time. While players can speed up time, that still leaves the eternity between stations, devoid of anything but the same rattle of the train over and over and over ad infinitum.

There is a kitty, though, so that helps.

Even those objectives that do appear don’t necessarily provide a break from the tedium. The game’s objectives shift between optional objectives to mandatory objectives that by and large resolve themselves. For much of the second half of the story, for instance, not much was asked of me as a player. Instead, the story rolled itself out in front of me, happy to explain everything that was about to happen so I could restate it to whichever character asked me for it. I was just another passenger on the train, with only the choices I didn’t know I was making having any real bearing on the plot. Even when my time wasn’t devoted to waiting for something to happen, there was a tedium in watching a game ostensibly about individual actions in a dystopia take the ability to make decisions and turn it into a linear engine.

And this is setting aside that, for the very ending, the only choice that mattered was one I had accidentally made hours before when I gave away an item I didn’t know I needed.

I do, Winston. I do.

Like many point and clicks, Beholder: Conductor is a very item-centric game. Unlike many other point and clicks, however, Beholder: Conductor has a nasty tendency to present an item well before it’s needed, while providing the player with disincentives to pick it up or hold on to it. This means that, for example, a passenger might board with an item that will be helpful for a later quest in their bag; however, I, not knowing about that quest, don’t have a reason to steal from them, thus accidentally failing the later quest. While there is a vendor at most stations that will sell items, these are not always the items that are needed, nor is there necessarily an alternate means by which to get the needed item. This is especially true of the ending, where a decision in the first hour or so of the game can lock players out of the ending entirely.

In some ways, Beholder: Conductor feels like a game designed with walkthroughs in mind. While the gameplay itself is simple and shallow, understanding how items interplay and what items are needed when is impossible on a first playthrough without having a guide. It’s an ultimately deeply frustrating experience.

What if I just...leave

Beholder: Conductor is a poor entry into an otherwise excellent series. While there are elements that reflect some of the nuanced view of autocracy and a surveillance state that make the rest of the series great, Beholder: Conductor is tedious, frustrating, and lacks nuance or agency.

This is, in some ways, I suppose reflective of the material itself. A bureaucrat in a dystopia doesn’t necessarily get to feel nuance or agency. Beholder: Conductor, however, captures the worst elements of that powerlessness. This isn’t a game about doing one’s best in a dystopia. It’s a game of tedium, paperwork, and the monotony of autocracy.

Developer: Alawar
Genre: Point and click
Year: 2025
Country: United States
Language: English
Time to complete: 5 hours
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/OBWFo11fry8