Ten years after the first game put players behind the peephole of a state-owned apartment block, Alawar has announced Beholder 4. The reveal landed on November 9 as the centrepiece of the series' 10th-anniversary celebrations, alongside a Steam store page and a debut teaser. The game is listed for PC through Steam, with no release date yet, and it turns the series' premise inside out: this time you are not the informer reporting on your neighbours, you are a Ministry official secretly working to bring the State down.
A double agent inside the Ministry
Every Beholder so far has cast you as a small cog doing the regime's dirty work, whether as Carl the landlord in the original, as a new building manager in Beholder 2's bureaucratic climb, or aboard the train of the mobile-and-PC spin-off Beholder: Conductor. Beholder 4 keeps the oppressive setting but moves you into the government itself. You play a young, ambitious civil servant whose superiors see a diligent, loyal employee. In reality you are an operative for the underground resistance, and Alawar's description hints that the hero is keeping a further secret even from those comrades.
That split defines the structure. During office hours you process citizens' files, sign orders and work your way up the career ladder. The real job starts when you leave your desk: wandering the Ministry's halls and restricted offices, listening in on conversations, looking through keyholes, stealing keys, cracking safes, forging paperwork and planting bugs. Alawar says each employee has a routine, weaknesses and secrets, and that your assignments will not point you to all of them, so some discoveries depend on being in the right place at the right moment.
Serving two masters
The compromising material you gather can be used to blackmail officials or funnelled to the resistance, and the game is built around assignments from both sides that often collide. Alawar's own example sums it up: the Ministry orders you to find a traitor among your colleagues, while the underground asks you to help that same person escape. Meanwhile a superior dangles a promotion that would open the classified archives, at the price of signing arrest orders with your own hand.
The studio is explicit that neither side is cast as purely right. The State is not always wrong, the resistance is not always noble, and the hero's own interests may outweigh both causes. In the reveal post, Alawar puts it bluntly: there is no button for doing the right thing, and every choice comes at a cost. That is the series' signature, and the dual-employer setup gives it more room than the landlord's single chain of command did.
Knock, knock: the police raids
The most obviously new system is the home search. You come back from work with stolen documents, there is a knock, and the police are at the door. You get a few seconds to stash evidence in vents, under the mattress or in other hiding spots around the apartment, or to destroy it outright, which Alawar warns is permanent: whatever information you burn is gone for good.
Then you watch the officers go through your home and hope they skip the wrong place. If they find something, you can try to talk your way out by lying, making excuses or pulling rank as a Ministry official. According to the store page, the searches grow more persistent as the game goes on, and eventually the police may turn up already knowing what they are looking for. It is a neat reversal for a series that has always been about rummaging through other people's belongings.
Love under surveillance
Beholder 4 also adds romance. The store page introduces four very different women whom the hero can get to know, help with personal problems, flirt with and take on dates. Alawar frames it as another risk rather than a refuge, since trusting anyone in this world is more dangerous than it seems, and its reveal post describes these relationships as fragile and spread across opposing factions.
Anniversary extras: a comic and a 90% discount
The announcement was one of three anniversary drops. The second is Beholder: The Landlord's Handbook, a digital comic now on Steam, which Alawar stresses is not a game. It is presented as an illustrated field manual for apartment managers, told through darkly comic vignettes about surveillance etiquette, with 10% off for its first two weeks.
The third is a deep discount on where it all began. The original Beholder is 90% off on Steam from November 9 to November 24, so anyone who wants to catch up on Carl's story before the sequel has two weeks to do it cheaply.
What we don't know yet
Alawar has not given a release window, a price or any console versions; Steam currently lists Beholder 4 for Windows only, with the date marked as to be announced. The studio is asking players to wishlist the game now and follow the series' channels for more Ministry news.
