Studio behind Papers, Please film releases next short, this time for surveillance sim Beholder

Kinodom Productions, the movie makers behind the excellent Papers, Please short film, have released their next project: an official film for Beholder, the bleak surveillance game about betraying your neighbours to please the all-powerful Ministry.

You can watch the film in full above. It's black and white and depressing as hell, and follows the story of one landlord asked to spy on his tenants to make sure they aren't doing anything illegal (spoiler: they are), all the while trying to help his sick daughter.

You'll either love or hate the art style, in which whites are eye-burningly bright, making the landlord's tie and set of keys shine like beacons (I'm a fan, personally). It has almost no sound other than the haunting music—a single track that ebbs and flows to match what's happening on screen for the full eight minutes.

If you played Beholder you'll immediately draw parallels between the game and the film, and even if you didn't play, it's worth a watch.

To find out more about the game, read Andy's take here. A sequel came out in December.

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.