Every carriage on the Determination Bringer has its secrets and in Beholder: Conductor, you’re the one sent to uncover them. You’re Winston Smith, a freshly appointed senior conductor moving through a totalitarian state where loyalty is currency and every passenger might be hiding something. Your tools are a ticket punch, a sharp eye and the uncomfortable authority to make someone’s journey end very badly.

What we love: The moment the first suspicion lands when a passenger does something that doesn’t quite add up. Do you report it and earn favour with the Ministry? Help them and risk your position? Or take a cut from the smugglers riding in the baggage car? As the train moves through stations, you’ll climb the hierarchy from a basic carriage to the private cabins of industrialists and officials, but the decisions get thornier. Who will you become by the time you reach the end of the line?

Quick tip: Search bags the moment passengers board. Items you find early may be needed for quests later in the journey and once a passenger leaves the train, so does their luggage. Don’t wait for an objective to prompt you; the train doesn’t stop for late decisions.

Meet the creator: Alawar has been making games since 1999 and the Beholder series is among its most celebrated. Created by an internal team called Warm Lamp Games, it was partly inspired by George Orwell’s 1984. That literary thread runs all the way to Beholder: Conductor, where the protagonist’s name, Winston Smith, is borrowed directly from the hero in Orwell’s book – a quiet reminder that even conductors punch tickets in someone else’s dystopia.