Recent reviews by JellyBug

It's really good and evocative of the old Mother Load flash game.

As a challenge-style puzzle game the "Relic Hunt" mode provides both a casual "dig it up, fight occasionally" difficulty up to a "meter-management hell" level of difficulty, where the RNG becomes much more of a factor. The pacing can quickly get frantic and every purchase will feel like a huge gamble, but it's not too unfair (unless you just get quite unlucky with the RNG).

However my favorite way to play is the with the "Autonomous" modifier, where your dome's defenses are entirely automated, almost entirely removing the defense mini-game. The pacing stays frantic but you're never shuffled back to the surface like you would be otherwise, instead you go back on your own accord, or when your dome needs repair and/or upgrades. It keeps the feeling of exploration throughout the whole session, instead of breaking it up with a mandatory turret section.

I find the Prestige mode extremely difficult but it's still a welcome end-game difficulty, just don't approach it like it's the same as Relic Hunt. I appreciate the alternate miner and primary weapon (although I typically play Autonomous, which removes the primary weapon) but for some reason their inclusion makes the game feel like it's lacking features. It would feel better to only have the Engineer and Laser, and have all your unlocks affect what you can discover (like Binding Of Issac). The very limited starting options make the game feel small, where no starting options but a focus on improving the Rouge-Like experience would make the game feel much bigger.

Regardless, the game is clearly make with a lot of love, and it shows in the beautiful pixel art and animations. This game feels like an extremely successful game-jam game that had features added on after release and I hope the developers make a fleshed-out sequel, because the time-sink aspect of running each session rivals other Rouge-Likes that I love, like BoI or Enter The Gungeon.

Definitely worth $10 to $15 if you like exploration, meter-managing rouge-likes, otherwise it's still a solid $5 or so pickup.

A really fun craft builder. Most of these kind of games are little overwhelming as they front-load a lot of their crafting mechanics onto a new player, but this one does as excellent job of softly introducing everything through very simple crafts, which encourage you to build something better rather than start from daunting scratch (but you can start from scratch if you'd like).

There's definitely some room for more mechanics to be introduced (both in the rover-builder and with the over-world) but it's already a good buy if you like truck driving and/or robot building.

This game is an absolutely incredible tech demo, wrapped in a sub-par non-interactive story. It reminds me a bit of Titanfall 1; the game-play is phenomenal, the story is told off screen through audio logs with absolutely no interactivity.

If the devs focused on the game-play aspects you'd have an astounding tech demo with extremely high repeatability, but next to nothing in terms of narrative (just themes of a cyberpunk dystopia and corporate fascism). Personally, that would be fine for me (I can imagine an adequate background story, just give me more of the fun game). However, the devs instead focused on the narrative, but in the laziest way possible. The story is an audio-book that occasionally plays in the background. It's full of trope-y characters who exposit their life story at an unspeaking player character for no reason. You'll never meet these characters (past their portrait art) and you'll never influence them. It's like working a shift at Walmart and listening to your coworkers complain about their manager while you stack boxes in the warehouse.

The game is also still pretty buggy. You'll run into switches that won't work, airlocks that you'll have to violently decompress to enter, object that will go Mach 10 for no reason and cut walls that will stick to object mounted behind them. Half of these bugs will kill you (especially objects suddenly flinging across the map) and that will suck. However, then the game works proper it's really cool.

I haven't bothered to finish the story, the game is a grind to me now because it hasn't changed substantially since early access and I got my fill of the tech demo about 2 years ago. I don't care how the story ends though because these aren't characters to me, they're just noisy associates who wont stop jamming my radio while I'm trying to have fun working.

It's an amazing tech demo though, so I recommend it when it's on sale (it's probably worth around $20), and that tech demo might be enough to drag you through the podcast of a story.

Not super scary but a great puzzle game with tons of atmosphere. If you like sci-fi horror and retro coding (think "Alien") than you'll absolutely love this game's presentation.

A good story with a solid game-play design behind it. Even if the story ends up being more linear than you expect you would never know your first time through. Every decision of what to report and what to ignore feels important and engaging, forcing you to make ethical decisions on what is and what isn't an invasion of privacy.

A perfect pick-up for anyone who likes text-based games or games discussing moral/ethical boundaries.

A great combination between "Papers, Please!" and "This War of Mine" with an interesting art-style. If you like moral decisions, tycoon games and emotional character stories this is a solid pick-up.

That said, it's also a game that seems to really stress trial-and-error. There is a constant stress for money in this game and not always a clear way to solving this issue. In "Papers, Please!" you always know how to make more money and it relies on your abilitiy to perform a task. In "Beholder" you don't always know how to make ends meet and this can be frustrating, resulting in save-scumming until you get a good quest-ending to get a decent sum of money.

In particular, there is a quest involving your daughter in the beginning. This quest is very time-limited and VERY expensive, well before you'll have earned that much money. I think you can delay this quest by not advancing it at a certain point (thus giving you time to make that money) but if you accidently start the quest the timer begins. The quest is technically optional but you'll be strongly incentivised to complete it.
This give you motivation to make money, for sure, but since the game is often unclear it can be not only stressful but frustrating when ends don't meet. Also, the idea you can delay a quest by not engaging it without knowing you're going to begin it before you talk to the character is poor design. I don't know the solution to such an issue and perhaps the idea you end up biting off more than you can chew is thematically appropriate but it encourages reloading saves to perform better.
Again, not to keep comparing to "Papers, Please!" but it's the perfect example of how to do this kind of narrative in-game, if you begin to fail at "Papers, Please!" it's slow. Your familt gets cold, then sick, then dead, then you die. In "Beholder" the endings are very sudden for characters, apart from the provided quest-timers.

So I think this game falls under "Papers, Please!" and above "This War of Mine" but is still well worth your time. The characters are engaging and their stories are compelling. I wish I wasn't so stressed about money that I could've treated them as more than just possible profit-cattle but I guess that's part of the point.

Post-Update Edit:
The most recent update added "Easy Mode", where your income is improved and your expenses are reduced. This of course removes alot of the stress this game tries to impose on you with time management and trading your morals for your family's security but it is a solution for those that wish to see more character stories but cannot get the income required.
The mode "spoils" quest-endings if you wish to replay it in the normal-mode but there are so many quests options and endings that even then you would still be suprised how your complex may end up.

The game is now a solid "must-buy" for all indie lovers.

A game caught somewhere on the line between a typical puzzle-game and an actual college computer-class's homework.

Get ready to do some thinking and debugging!

If you're looking for a more tongue-and-cheek BroForce with a higher difficulty curve, this is that exactly.
If you're looking for a funny, relaxing and cathartic game, this doesn't quite fit that niche like Broforce does.
And if you're looking for a pulsing moment-to-moment game that pushes you to the edge of your seat, go play Hotline Miami.

I think it's worth buying, but I ran into gameplay issues that struck me as being done better in Devolver's other games;

-The cover system: It's the same button as slide, which sometimes makes it awkward to take cover when an enemy is close.
-The enemies: They are pretty fast to react and move. That's part of the difficulty, which is fine, but it leads me to my next issue;
-The controls: My biggest issue. It's just awkward to play on a keyboard and you can't remap key-bindings to something comfortable. I had to play on a controller and remap to something I liked and it still felt clunky.
Reload is tough to keep track of with fast enemies that only advance when you reload.
Sliding feels ok, until it slows down, but still feels a little wonky to do.
I couldn't remap "shoot" to a trigger on my 360 pad, so I have to use the shoulder buttons.
-There's no way of knowing how much health an enemy has left, and some of them are real bullet sponges
-Your health audio for when you're two "bars" away from death and one bullet away from death is that same.
-Death: It just feels punishing. You usually don't actually know what ultimately killed you unless it's a one-on-one fight.
-Dialog: It's well written and funny, but it's TOO SLOW. It goes past comedic timing and enters exhausting when it's pushing two sentences every 25 seconds and there is a paragraph of stuff to move through. I usually hit the 75% mark and skipped the rest just to get back to the game, and skipped almost all the post-level stuff because of this.

All this said, I like the game. It's fun, it's colorful, it's a laugh and it's violent. It just feels like a mash up of other, more tight, Devolver games without the fine tuning to really slam it home for me.

A really fun game to play in bursts.
Playing as a diver gives a good sense of isolation and dread with low-vision enviroments and a shark-sensing heartbeat.
Playing as a shark is just as tense by forcing the shark to charge, grab, eat and run before the rest of the divers team lays sight on you.

Really immersive and fun, although I hope they overhaul the menus a little (it reminds me of a cheap 90's era computer game).