The last entry was of a bucket of joy from Pixar, so the natural follow up for this week’s entry is Prison Architect, the popular indie simulation game available on Steam.
Prison Architect is at first glimpse one of those strange simulation games where you, as the title suggests, design your very own prison and make sure your inmates are happy (or not). This management simulation game, developed by Introversion Software, has steadily grown to become one of the most popular indie games in the past three years after its initial alpha pre-order release in 2012. Thus far it has sold over 10 million copies, and as of 6th October it was officially released on Steam.
The whole concept of the game is simple. The game starts of on a SimCity-like map with a piece of land where you are the architect and supervisor of a private prison. You choose everything from layout, what types of inmates you want, how the inmates are punished if misbehaving, to how the prison regime is planned out. It is this incredibly detailed gameplay that intrigued me because everything you do have consequences. Unlike other simulation games, such as Rollercoaster Tycoon, Prison Architect is highly realistic in this regard, and is more focused on the actual dynamics of your management choices than RCT is. I mean, people still happily come to your amusement park even though you kill everyone in one of your rides. In Prison Architect on the other hand, if you lock up your inmates for too long, they will get cranky and inevitably riot, which sometimes results in murders.
The true beauty of this game lies in the vast array of choices you have. In a sense it is a sandbox game where you essentially can do whatever you want. If you want a snug “Norwegian” prison with freedom, exclusive and charming cells, a park, and the possibility for education, you can. Or, if you are like me, enjoy running a large “American” maximum-security prison with high-risk inmates only packed into tiny cells, because let’s face it; the inmates in this game are ungrateful pricks who don’t appreciate luxuries such as sofas and TV’s, you can do that too. What both of these choices have in common though, is that regardless of the size of your prison, the difficulty of the game increases as you grow and time passes.
This is what makes the game challenging as well because as your prison becomes larger, you need new buildings to accommodate upcoming needs, and early in the game it’s easy enough. However, as the prison develops, and the number of inmates increases you have to be on top of staff, surveillance, cell layout, designated yard times. It is for instance, a TERRIBLE idea to have minimum risk inmates and high-risk inmates in the yard simultaneously! Oh, and snitches exists, and you probably know what happens to snitches in prison? You guessed it. That’s something you should take care of too.
All of these aspects in the game are what hooked me because there is always something to do, something to micromanage, or something to build, and you could argue that a prison is a self-reliant city where everything needs to run smoothly and every citizen, and every water pipe matters. In other words, whether you choose to run a small or a large prison, a high-risk only, or a minimum risk only prison, or a mix between the two, everything needs to be planned, zoned out, and managed properly.
To summarise, Prison Architect is a thoroughly enjoyable game you can immerse yourself in for hours. Nevertheless, as you play, sometimes your choices and the upgrades you need to complete feels forced upon. For example, in order to progress in the game you need a given number of inmates. In practical terms this means that the freedom to have the prison of your choice, even though it’s there, is discouraged by the game itself. Even with 100 inmates you are encouraged to continuously develop and upgrade, and if you choose not to, your save comes to a halt, which rarely results in a positive gaming experience.
With that said, Prison Architect will give you hours of simulation fun, and the playful, yet serious approach to how a prison should be managed is overall an enjoyable adventure.
16/20
CapableNormal 