In Beholder: Conductor, being a good employee means turning in the passengers

This Beholder spin-off swaps the setting for a train cutting across a fictional country under the Ministry's eye — and splits players between praising the atmosphere and griping about the lack of a save button.

An old man, a forbidden sausage and a cat made of pixels

Check an elderly man's ticket, peek through the keyhole and catch him eating a sausage that lacks the Ministry's stamp, report the crime, watch the train brake in the middle of nowhere so the police can haul him out through the window — and, five minutes later, report another passenger just for asking why the tea had gone cold. That's how one Russian player summed up his first shift on the job, after three hours at the post, on July 14. His reward: access to the VIP car and a chance to pet a cat drawn in pixels.

The game puts you in the post of senior conductor aboard the Bearer of Determination, a legendary train that every town in the story's fictional country is waiting to see pull into its own station. The job is to keep order in your assigned car and assist the passengers — except the tools of the role are reporting, intimidating, searching and throwing people off, and the internal rulebook always sides with whoever wears the uniform. Suspicious luggage earns a call to the police; a passenger who tries to dodge the fare becomes a line in a report. It's surveillance dressed up as customer service.

Climbing the ranks opens up the dining car and the VIP compartments, where senior officials and industrialists travel — people who may also be carrying a bribe or contraband, and it's up to you to decide whether to log that too. Earning your superiors' trust unlocks special assignments, whose secrecy scales with the loyalty you've shown and is paid out in bonuses or promotions; running into smugglers along the way is risky and pays better than sticking to the manual. The train passes through a range of stations and remote corners of the fictional country, and every decision about a passenger or a colleague weighs on their fate — and on yours, all the way to the end of the line.

The studio that also keeps watch over secret laboratories

Alawar, the game's studio and publisher, first released the title on April 23, 2025. From there the train kept rolling: it later reached PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, widening the pool of who could climb aboard. On its official feed, the studio also celebrated passing 500,000 copies sold, thanking everyone who kept the train moving.

That same feed shows what came next: on August 12, the day before this report was filed, the studio released Security 51, a security sim that likewise has you watching over whoever descends into a secret laboratory and deciding who gets in and who stays out — the same gesture of checking papers and refusing entry that drives the train in Conductor. Before that, in April, came The Last Gas Station, a laid-back game about running a gas station at the edge of the world, with no papers to check at all. Alawar, then, alternates between building worlds of control and worlds of care — and Beholder: Conductor sits firmly on the side that orders you to stop and show your ID.

The woman who turns up in every good review

In the positive reviews, one character's name recurs in English and in Russian with the same admiration: Michelle. She's the kind of character who makes you hope to stay on the train one more stop, even before you know what that will cost. One English-speaking player, eleven hours in, on July 23, boiled his fondness down to saying she alone made the trip worth it. On the other side of the language line, a Russian with eighteen hours, on August 8, admitted she was the one who drew his attention to the game in the first place. Another, at six hours, went so far as to ask for extra content just so he could leave the protagonist's family behind and stay with her. And on Steam, where the game is sold and these reviews were posted, that preference crosses the language border without losing any of its force.

The other recurring idea is that the choices here aren't just set dressing: a player with four hours at the post, on July 21, described the fear common to games like this — that a decision is only an illusion — and said that here it carries real weight, with consequences for who survives the journey. One who reached twelve hours, on July 22, went further, calling the game a hidden gem in the Beholder universe and recommending it as the place to start the series, praising its memorable characters and the world built up around the train.

Even among those who recommend it, no one pretends the ride is flawless. A player with fourteen hours, on August 2, liked the story and the choices but pointed to annoying bugs that get in the way of missions, and complained that completing the game one hundred percent turns into a tiresome chore without a button to save manually. The same absence that lends the spying its tension also comes at a cost for anyone who wants to see it all through.

Searching the same suitcase twice

The most common complaint is the very gap that bothers even the fans: there's no way to save manually. A player with two hours, on July 24, dropped the game after discovering that every mistake sends you back to the previous checkpoint — and it's you who has to start the whole interrogation over, from scratch, with no chance to pick up where you left off. Another, at five hours, the next day, griped that the autosaves themselves overwrite one another without warning, erasing progress he had wanted to revisit.

There are also those who never really got to play at all: one account with no hours logged, from July 25, describes the game crashing over and over while still in the tutorial. Two other points come back across different reviews. An entire ending can hinge on a nearly invisible choice made right at the start — starting all over just to see a different outcome feels like a waste of time. And the final third of the story, for those who got that far, like a player with eleven hours on August 10, drops the investigating-and-watching mechanic and turns into simply watching scenes go by, with a plot he found too weak to carry that stretch on its own.

Even that player, though, admits that a second playthrough pays off more once you've memorized the flow — logging, blackmailing, reporting — and that some of the train's visual work catches the eye. The dip isn't in the art; it's in the stamina.

Who gets off the train before the next station

Anyone who can stomach losing their progress to a silly mistake — and revisiting the same inspection form without tiring of it — will find in a train full of secrets more than enough reason to stay. Anyone expecting to save at any moment and see every choice reflected equally in the ending gets off before the next station. Those who have finished it put the trip at somewhere between six and eight hours, depending on your pace — enough for a self-contained story, too short for anyone who wanted more consequence per hour played.

The uniform gives you power over everyone in the car, but not over the game itself: here the Ministry is in charge, and you only find out how far your loyalty goes when it's already too late to turn back.