Beholder 2

Review

Do you want the good or bad news first? It’s an expression used commonly, and generally expressed verbally, either from a communication device or face to face. Well, this wasn’t the case for Evan Redgrave. He received his good and bad news by a letter, and by someone he doesn’t know.  The good news is, his transfer was accepted to the ministry of state. It is a prestigious place to work within our dictatorial state. After all, millions of peoples have been trying to get a job at the ministry for years. The bad news is that his father, Caleb Redgrave, who he hasn’t talked to for many years and who is one of the top managers, accidentally fell to his death from the 37th floor of the ministry a few days earlier. It’s very intriguing, wouldn’t you say? It’s time for you to observe in Beholder 2!

Beholder 2 is a point and click adventure game with choice matter elements, developed by Warm Lamp Games and published by Alawar Premium on Steam on 5^th of December 2018. You’ll be playing Evan Redgrave and your goal is to gain promotions within the ministry, so you can discover the truth surrounding the death of your father.

At the start of the game, you’ll be briefly playing Caleb Redgrave, and will partially see what happened to him, which includes the part of his free fall to the ground from the 37th floor. Then you’ll take over your character, Evan, his son.  From here, you be able to see the ministry map which is divided into four floors. The first floor will have 6 locations to visit, including his house, while the second and third floor will each have 3 locations to discover, and the last floor has only one.

Your first day at work will be an interesting introduction to the ministry. Not only are you new, but all your co-workers will know who you are; the son of Caleb Redgrave, the guy who became a pancake at the entrance of the ministry. Therefore, they will be worried about opening up and talking to you. What you’ll need to do is to become friends with them. The way to do so is to find out which shows they like to watch at night in their free time, which in this case, is their favourite night time series. The other thing you can do, is to complete tasks they gave you. When you have successfully completed these tasks, you’ll be rewarded either with money or influence points. The money is extremely important as you will receive bills every single day, mostly for your apartment’s ongoing costs, and they will need to be paid on a specific day. You can make additional income by processing visitors’ paperwork from your workstation at your ministry booth. It will cost you a certain amount of time within your 9-hour shift to do this.  However, you might find all the right information in a short period of time and might decide to go home early. The reminding time will be added to your evening free time and you might use it to watch a tv series, learn new skills or go out to get further information.

In terms of the influence’s points, they will come in handy when you need to get additional information from individuals within the ministry; however, it might cost you a certain number of influence points to persuade them to talk to you and get further important information.

Graphically, the game looks superb and the soundtrack is great too. In terms of the controls, it’s a combination between the keyboard and the mouse.  The gameplay will become repetitive as you move up onto the ministry.