"They're burning down the empire, but the trains still run on time." - Splitsville

In dystopian civilizations, people still have places to be, right? Thing is, do their destinations serve the state, and what are they taking with them? In Beholder: Conductor, it’s your job to discover these truths, then decide what to do with that information.

Beholder: Conductor is a spinoff of Alawar’s Beholder series, which saw three releases for Switch between 2018 and 2023. I’ve played none of them, although Beholder: Complete Edition did get a 7.5/10 in Jemma Casson’s review for Pure Nintendo. Those games tasked the player with spying and ratting on citizens in their work and home lives. This time, you’re aboard the menacingly named Determination Bringer.

You play Winston Smith, a new senior conductor assigned to the third-class carriage of the train. Your role is simple: set up the cabins for their passengers, help them board, check their passes for any discrepancies, and monitor their behavior. If you find anything out of order, report it. Or don’t. How far you advance up the train—and who even survives the trip—is determined by your decisions…but there’s more than one way to do your job.

This is evidenced early in your training. It’s explained that reporting issues to the Ministry is pretty much all you’re supposed to be doing, but you get a mysterious call early reminding you that a personal debt needs to be paid. Will serving the Ministry pay you enough by the deadline, or should you resort to alternative methods? There are plenty of passengers on the train with plenty of needs to address. You can’t please them all, and you’re going to have to bend some rules to please pretty much any of them. Which rules you decide to bend will, of course, determine the game’s outcome.

Helping with all of this is a drug that allows Winston to forgo sleep. You’d think this would be a terrible thing, but others want the drug, too, as it allows them to work more efficiently. And by work, I mean spy on passengers, rummage through their luggage, and engage in other methods of digging up dirt to either report to the powers-that-be or use to blackmail/bargain with the passengers themselves. You can even frame passengers if you so desire, and there may be times when that is absolutely necessary for your own survival.

So, Beholder: Conductor isn’t the type of game where you’re working towards a good ending. Winston is living a grim life in an oppressive world, and the game is more about helping him navigate that than about healing society’s ills no matter how many times you replay it.

And you likely will replay, provided a few issues don’t turn you away. The story and character interactions are enough to keep things moving along, but the interface often trips up gameplay. Just moving through the train can be cumbersome, with one joystick controlling your character and another controlling the camera.

Zooming out from the train would help you get your bearings, but doing so turns off the interior view.

Other gameplay elements are complicated by the clunky controls. Rummaging through a passenger’s suitcase, for example, is complicated by the method required to place the items on the seat as you dig deeper into the contents. Maybe it’s easier with a mouse on the PC, which makes me wish Beholder: Conductor, was available natively for Switch 2. That would help with inventory management, too, as your list of confiscated/swiped items grows.

Also, the game is filled with unnecessary downtime. There were numerous segments when I was walking back and forth in search of something to do, only to learn there was nothing to do until the train made its next stop. In a game where important tasks are time sensitive, this creates unnecessary anxiety.

Visually, the game makes great use of its pixelated graphics to provide motion and exacerbate the tension.

The soundtrack is quite clever, too, feeling like the type of music a totalitarian state would force on its people in an attempt to keep them relaxed.

The whole experience ends up being quite compelling. Working your way up to the more luxurious cars provides a sense of satisfaction in the otherwise depressing job, and there are numerous moments of brevity to break up the day…albeit occasionally morbid brevity. The story and characters are never boring, but your assigned tasks can be, creating a weird disconnect that prevents Beholder: Conductor from being as fun as it could be. In that way, I suppose it’s like an actual train excursion; there’s plenty to see and experience, but once the novelty wears off, you’re trapped until you either arrive at your destination or you’re arrested for transporting an item you don’t recall packing.