While many games in the city-building genre task you with making a place that keeps people happy — a town, a retail shop, theme park — very rarely are those same people actively plotting against you to plunge your plans into anarchy.
Though it's been around for a while — growing a great deal on its path from super successful crowdfunded alpha in 2012 to PC release last year — Prison Architect has now arrived in the gen pop of the console market. And, while getting accustomed to its rules and processes over the first few hours of play can feel like hard labour, this is a deep, complex and satisfying experience sure to make gamers raised on Sim City, Theme Hospital or Dwarf Fortress very happy.
On a macro scale, the game is about running a successful private prison. This means designing and building the various structures (along with the power grid and water pipes to go with them), making sure your inmates behave and have all their needs met, and managing to turn a profit at the end of the day.
Of course it's never as easy as that.
Simply design a prison with good food, nice cells and plenty to keep the inmates occupied and they'll walk all over you. Whether it's escape by underground tunnel or regular riots in the mess hall, inmates will find a way to abuse your hospitality and force you to be a bit more severe in your designs. Running a prison that keeps as many people happy as possible while minimising deaths, damage and escape is a tricky business that requires constant monitoring.
While the tools at your disposal are smart and deep, the main issue with Prison Architect is that it doesn't teach you about those skills very well, if at all. The short campaign mode focuses more on completely gratuitous stories about the crimes certain prisoners committed than it does on showing you the ropes, meaning you'll be hitting up Google more than once while you're crafting your early big houses. Then again, if you're the type that relishes learning to swim by being thrown in the deep end, the lack of tutorial may not be such an issue.
There are heaps of options to make the operation harder (or easier) to manage, so you can set your own challenge level accordingly. If you stick with it, you'll soon go from a small county jail to a huge maximum security establishment that requires guard dogs, custom guard routes to root out drug smuggling, CCTV cameras and myriad other precautions. Yet even in the most controlled environments, Prison Architect always finds a way to surprise you and point out the flaws in your incarceration paradise.
Prison Architect is out now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.
