Bleak government spying sim Beholder has a sequel out next year

After Andy played Beholder last year he described it as a cross between Papers, Please and gloomy East Berlin police drama The Lives of Others, which sounds about as bleak as a game could get. You were a landlord employed by the government to spy on your neighbors, forced to grass them up (and watch them get taken away in the back of a van) or else risk your job, and your family's lives. You can expect more moral dilemmas like that from Beholder 2, which developer Warm Lamp Games has announced with a teaser trailer, above.

The difference this time around is that you're embedded within a department of the totalitarian state. You begin at the bottom of the ladder and work your way up, no doubt leaving a trail of wrecked careers (and a few tragic accidents) in your wake.

The trailer gives little away other than the fact there's stacks of paperwork, but the Steam page suggests it will be pretty free form. You can play by the book and serve the top brass, or you can make a move for the Prime Minister's hot seat yourself. You can even be a whistle blower, if you're feeling particularly brave, which suggests a wider story with protest groups fighting against the state.

Beholder 2 will be out in the second half of 2018. The Steam page is here.

Thanks, RPS.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.