Prison Architect's ecosystem is far tighter, far more sensitive, with budgets that aren't sympathetic to constant demolition or rearrangement, and then there are the penalties for incompetence. This isn't Sim City, where some neighbourhoods end up trashier than others, or where a quick bulldozing fixes an infrastructure imperfection. This is because every construction choice matters. Every prisoner may have their personality, but the prison itself is always the central character, the locus around and through which everything else happens. It's about planning, about environment and about layout, all of which affect safety, security and reliability. So much of Prison Architect is about construction. Most of the time, they can be relied upon, but occasionally they need a firm hand, not least because their work is as critical as anyone else's. This can include building every segment of a sewage pipe bar one before moving onto a completely different task, or pathing slowly and clumsily around a building to try to finish the last section of a security fence. You'll need to watch those folks carefully, as they have a curious habit of performing their tasks in unusual orders. The latter are your worker ants, scurrying about your compound as you demand more fences, plan out new a new wing or decide that, yes, your inmates really do deserve a common room with all the luxury of a pool table and television set. Your most basic employees are guards and construction staff, the former shuttling prisoners to and fro or providing pugilist persuasion to anyone who has delusions of liberty. For posterity: Here's a picture of the worst inmate I've ever had. You may or may not be be concerned with comfort levels, re-education programmes or cleanliness but, first and foremost, you care about profit. Dangerous lodgers are more valuable but, as you might imagine, more inclined to disrupt or attempt escape from the confines of the Hotel California you have created. The more you accommodate, the more money you make. None of your guests want to be there and some distant authority is paying their rent. The fundamentals are simple: your prison is compulsory lodging. The world is your oyster and it's up to you how cruelly and tightly it closes. If you'd prefer a modest and manicured minimum-security facility, somewhere where things never get nasty, drag a few sliders to keep out undesirables and hire a gardener. If your vision of a prison is a vast, brutalist hellscape that occupies every inch of available land, you can make that happen. While there is an entertaining campaign to play through, which will teach you first the basics and later the nuances of prison administration, the real soul of this game is found in the blank canvas of correction it lays out for you. Prison Architect's greatest strength is the freedom it gives you in denying others theirs. I was a happier warden when I was an ignorant one. Before I started revealing their secret vices, before I was able to clamp down on their bad behaviour, running my prison wasn't too difficult. In Introversion's prison management game, which has just emerged from a long spell in Early Access, the more you know about what goes on in your prison the more unhappy you'll be - and, likely, the more unhappy your inmates will be. They do an excellent job of sniffing out contraband hidden in whatever crevices prisoners hide contraband in, they quickly find the tunnels inmates have been slowly scratching out and they chase down escapees like furry homing missiles.īut in discovering all those smuggled drugs, in revealing those hidden tunnels, those dogs also make your life more complicated. If I have one tip for you, it's that you should get dogs.ĭogs are wonderfully versatile.
Double Eleven has handled the console versions, introducing a new introductory Prison Warden mode with ready-made prisons, as well as featuring a mode that lets you share and play other people's prisons. Editor's note: Prison Architect releases on consoles this week, and to mark the occasion we're returning to our original review of the game, first published last October.