Beholder: Conductor has a fantastic dystopian train-management setup, but on PS5 the controls fight the experience more than they should
I went into Beholder: Conductor completely fresh. I have not played the previous Beholder games, so I did not bring any attachment to the series or its lore. What pulled me in was much simpler: the look of it and the premise. A grim little pixel-art train game where you act as a conductor, inspect tickets, spy on passengers, search luggage, report suspicious behavior, and slowly become another tool of an autocratic state? That sounded extremely my thing.
And honestly, the game does deliver on that fantasy. You play as Winston Smith, the new conductor aboard the Determination Bringer, a grand train treated like the jewel of the state. Your job sounds boring on paper, but it quickly becomes a whole mess of bureaucracy, surveillance, intimidation, and small moral compromises. You check tickets, peek through keyholes, rummage through luggage, feed prisoners, bring passengers food or items, file reports to the Ministry, accuse people, blackmail them, fine them, arrest them, steal from them, and keep the train running while your superiors breathe down your neck.
That basic loop is strong. It reminded me a lot of Papers, Please, not because it copies that game directly, but because it understands the satisfaction of turning paperwork into pressure. A ticket is not just a ticket. Is the name correct? Is the route right? Is this passenger hiding something? Should I let this student ride without a proper ticket and lose a big chunk of notoriety, or should I throw them in the brig because that is what the state wants?
The game constantly gives you these little ugly choices. You can help a wife break her husband out by giving sleeping-pill cakes to guards, or you can give the cake to the prisoner instead and watch the plan collapse when the officers catch her. You can adopt a cat, spend your hard-earned money on bowls, food, and toys, and keep it in your cabin, only for your higher-up to punish you when he finds out. You can report everything suspicious, punish everyone who steps out of line, and be rewarded for becoming the exact kind of person this regime wants you to be.
That is where Beholder: Conductor is at its best. The game makes obedience feel profitable. Money and notoriety are your main resources, and both matter. Money lets you buy useful goods on the train or from black market dealers outside stations. Notoriety keeps you in the good graces of the Ministry. Lose too much of it and you get beaten down, arrested, and it is game over. Serve the state well and you get promoted, which mostly means more work and more ways to ruin people's lives efficiently.
I ended up playing as the most loyal state servant imaginable. If something looked suspicious, I reported it. If someone had contraband, I punished them. If the game offered me a chance to be kind, I usually looked at the resource cost and decided Winston liked his job too much. That made the experience weirdly compelling because I was not role-playing a hero trapped inside a bad system. I was playing a guy who found the system useful.
Still, I wish the consequences felt bigger more often. There are choices, and some of them are clever, but they did not always feel like they dramatically reshaped how I progressed. Maybe that changes more if you resist the Ministry, but in my run, nothing truly wild happened. I stayed loyal, got paid, got promoted, and kept moving through the train.
The day-to-day work can also have dull stretches. You wait for passengers to leave their cabins so you can search their luggage. You wait for the train to reach a station so new people can board. There is tension when you are dragging forbidden items out of a suitcase and trying to put everything back before the passenger returns, but there are also quiet pockets where you are just killing time until the next useful thing happens.
On PC, I imagine that rhythm is much easier to accept. On PS5, the biggest problem is the control scheme. Beholder: Conductor is full of text, menus, tiny interactable objects, scrolling lists, dragged items, reports, tickets, icons, cabin inventories, and small UI targets. Playing that with a controller means moving an in-game cursor around with an analog stick, and that never stops feeling awkward.
To be clear, the game works. This is not a broken port. The developers have translated the controls about as well as they probably could. You can absolutely play it from start to finish on PS5. The issue is that it rarely feels good. Rummaging through luggage should be tense because you might get caught. On PS5, it is tense partly because you are wrestling with a cursor, dragging objects around, misplacing things, opening the wrong thing, and trying to navigate a billion menus quickly before someone comes back from taking a piss.
That friction matters because Beholder: Conductor is all interface. Filing reports, moving items, reading directives, managing inventory, checking documents, and jumping between wagons need to feel clean and immediate. With a mouse, I can see this being far smoother. With analog sticks, it feels like the worst way to play a game built on precision clicking.
Visually, though, I really like it. The pixelated art style is immediately striking, and the tiny shadow-like characters have more personality than you might expect. Their silhouettes are simple, but little details make them readable. The lower-class wagons have this drab, plain, miserable look that fits the autocratic mood perfectly.
The atmosphere does a lot of work. The colors are muted, the cabins feel oppressive, and the whole thing has that constant sense that everyone is being watched by someone. Even when you are just doing routine conductor work, there is a nastiness underneath it. You are not serving passengers. You are managing suspects.
That is why I still liked Beholder: Conductor despite my issues with the PS5 version. The core concept works. The systems are interesting. The train setting is strong. The little moral compromises can be fun in a bleak way, especially if you fully lean into being a state-loving bastard like I did. But the controls seriously undermine the experience on console.
If PS5 is your only option and the premise really speaks to you, this version is playable and still worth considering. If you have a PC, I would absolutely play it there instead. Beholder: Conductor is a good dystopian management game trapped inside a controller layout that makes its most common actions more annoying than they need to be. Thanks for reading!
