What does it take for someone to betray?
The darkest of human nature told by a video game series
In a totalitarian state, what the great mind thinks becomes gospel truth for a hundred thousand lesser ones. — Serge Moscovici, “The Age of the Crowd: A Historical Treatise on Mass Psychology”
I first discovered Beholder on Steam in 2017. It wasn’t until 2021 when I finally completed the first installment. It took another year and a half before I decided to play the second game in 2023. Last night, after a distressful meltdown over the current political climate, I started Beholder 3.
The 1st and 3rd games are identical in terms of gaming mechanism: you play Carl/Frank, a pathetic cog in the totalitarian state managed by “the Ministry” where criminals are thrown into “the Mines” as slave labors till their deaths. You, however, was a teeny bit more fortunate as your desk, civil servant job made you useful. Instead of being thrown into the mines, you were reassigned, with your wife and children, to an apartment complex as the new property manager. In addition to building maintenance, you must install cameras, trespass into tenants’ homes, and search for anything illegal or that can threaten the Ministry — the latter can be anything from a newspaper clip to a CD. You then tip of the tenant for a bonus on top of your measly salary. A bigger bonus is granted for tenants taken away as a criminal.
You are an evil, despicable scum — are you?
As the game unfolds, something terrible happens to each of your family. In the original Beholder, Carl’s little girl becomes gravely ill and her lifesaving medication is only accessible via the Black Market at an astronomical price. His teenage son is a humanitarian, siding with the rebels and again costing him a sky-high price to be kept out of the mines. If you fail to save both the children, your wife commits suicide. A similar pattern unfolds in Beholder 3. Yet to keep your family alive, happy, and nearby, your only chance is by planting fake evidences in your tenants’ rooms for the extra bonuses.
What should you do?
You also must choose whether to help the tenants, varying from scientists and doctors being hunted down to a former Ministry scientist who developed nerve gas weapons and is now being disposed of by the totalitarian state. She is also a mother. Her daughter is a terrible, brainwashed little minion of the state. She begs for you to let them go and even promises to help you flee abroad when the time comes. You can also join the rebellion forces and take a direct shot at the Ministry. But each of these benevolent act could come with grave costs, devastating not only you but whatever family members you have left when these events are triggered.
What do you do?
Developed by Russian-based Warm Lamp Games, the Beholder series reveal a terrible truth deeply buried in our humanity: if the leverage is heavy enough, each one of us might choose to betray our communities. Throughout the game, you may find familiar references to Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, or Huxley’s Brave New World. And if you’re like me who was born in a totalitarian nation, you might even recognize snippets from your own history.
For example, what happens in Beholder 1 & 3 is exactly how China pitted its own citizens against each other during the 10 years of nightmarish Cultural Revolution (1966-1967), and plenty of people: young or old, educated or not, firmly believed that they were doing the necessary evil — the right, justful things. The things that are reportable as crime and resistance including reading banned books, having antique artifacts from Ancient China, spreading propaganda as a writer or an artist, being a previous sex worker, refusing to marry a government official, turning down a forced relocation by the government, disagreeing and disrespecting Chairman Mao, being a Christian, speaking highly of foreign entities, or simply, not living in absolute poverty. Masked as societal redistribution for equality, Cultural Revolution was a war on the Chinese people conducted by the Communist Party’s King Mao Tse-tong and his minions to gain full control over their physical, emotional, cultural, and spiritual existence. Journals became state-run and independent publications were illegalized. Foreign nations were antagonized into monsters and access to outside knowledge becomes a privilege exclusively enjoyed by the ruling class. Education was supervised and controlled, following a strict syllabus. Individuality and diversity are erased via the introduction of uniforms and standard haircuts.
At the same time, resources were rationed using a voucher system, including everything from rice, cooking oil, fabric, soap, matches, to salt and soy sauce. With the removal of private-owned properties, private businesses, and any forms of open and free market competition, the Communist Party controlled the pricing of all commodities and the distribution of vouchers, which not only pummeled the general public into extreme poverty, but opened gates for an unprecedented level of corruptions and oppressions. To gain favors of government officials, more neighbors would sell each other out. Trust between the people reached its lowest level in history and all traditional senses of honor, ethics, shame, and loyalty to your own community was completely sabotaged and dissolved. “Obedience equals safety, betrayal brings wealth” became the common sense and left an open wound that continues to gush out blood even today, deeply planting a necessity to stay silent and complacent in the Chinese genes.
“There’s nothing you can do.” I remember my parents warning me. “Keep your mouth shut. You don’t live in a country with the freedom of speech.“
They came from a place of care and concern, I know.
They simply don’t understand how and why self-silencing and self-censoring feels no difference than death to me.
And you might say: well, I’m not gonna be like that. I’ll fight till the day I die — I’D RATHER DIE.
But that’s where the true terror of the Beholder games lie: you realize your spirit to fight is not as strong as you think, especially under a totalitarian-police state where you and your family’s survival is at full, unnegotiable risk. Maybe it’s your little girl asking for one piece of candy, or your boy’s tuition so he can continue his education. You tell yourself you’d just fulfil this one mission. But soon, you realized there’s no turning back. One action triggers an avalanche. Your ethics, honor, loyalty is as fragile as the shitty washer that keeps breaking down in the basement. You watch the horror unfold as more ordinances are released by the Ministry, condemning more activities as illegal and corruptive: music, dancing, speaking a foreign language… Your determination on not betraying your tenants would look more insignificant and ridiculous as the game progresses. Even if you don’t do it, somebody else will. The results are the same, except without the bonus money, your kid dies.
What will you do?
Then, there’s Beholder 2, where you play Evan, a young Ministry employee who’s doing what he can to help people instead of screwing them over. Evan joined the Ministry and climbed the ranks because he need to find out why his father was murdered, only to discover a secret mass mind controlling project that was under development.
If Beholder 1 & 3 is a cruel portrayal of how weak our individual beliefs could be, then, Beholder 2 is the hopeless description of what happens to the general public when they’ve become content under the totalitarian-police occupation. While this is the only time where you’d have the opportunity to end the totalitarian state, to replace the Minister (AKA the Big Brother), or leave things as-is and live in safety and luxury. Except each ending only leads to more despair.
In my first run, I choose to free the people by blowing up the mass mind control towers only to be told that “little has changed” because the nation has become so used to its existing structure. Fight for power continued and “a lack of principles became a synonym for success.”
In my second run, I connected myself to Project Heidmall (GOD MODE), the mass mind control system, hoping that Evan’s integrity would serve as a trustworthy guide even in such a grotesque and bizarre configuration. “Evan Redgrave is a God now! And what does it matter that the fate of all Gods is loneliness?” — Your character becomes the forever regulator of equality and justice, stripped of his humanity with machine-reinforced divinity. Since he is a kind, moral character, that is as close of a Happy Ending as you’d get in Beholder 2.
But that is not right. Because that state of peacefulness is forged through mind control. If stripping the citizens of their minds and individual emotions is the only way to keep the nation running healthily, then, that is not a society. It is a factory: a bee hive controlled by one Queen — it is, still, totalitarianism.
So, in my third run, I just let the bad guys throw me out of the window. And sadly, the caption read: “And only during that fall, in a state of absolute terror, did Evan truly feel free for the first time in his life. Even if only for a fraction of a second.“
Devastated, I reinstall the original Beholder. This time, I strictly follow the playthrough online and reach the only good ending where revolution slowly spread like sparkles until it turns into an ocean of flames.
A new tomorrow arrives. But… Is that hope?
I don’t know.
The entire Beholder series can be purchased as a bundle on Steam here.