Are you a control freak? Does your life consist of planning ahead, over and over again? Do you draw enjoyment from pushing others around to do your biding? Do you like it when someone's freedom and life are in your hands? Well, looks like you might enjoy Prison Architect - I certainly do.
So what's Prison Architect you ask? It's the brainchild of Introversion Software and an Indie Game orbiting around the idea of designing a prison. How? Pretty much how the title suggests - you take the role of a prison warden and build it from the ground up - your tasks are both macromanagement by assigning positions within the prison's administration structure and micromanagement by creating facilities, assigning guard posts, managing finances and the daily schedule and much, much more, going so in-deep as to have the prisoners individually searched if you see someone carrying a knife somewhere in your peripheral vision.
As you can see in the attached video, the game's world is shown from a Bird's Eye view at all times, which is to be expected from a "Tycoon-Style" game, although I'd say it's more akin to the Dungeon Keeper series, if anything. The graphics are humorous and simplistic, akin to those of Faster Than Light, although the game can get pretty dark in tone sometimes.
If you don't have a Janitor to clean up the mess, prepare to be constantly reminded about your failures (mostly in containing incidents or smuggling) by smudges of blood all over the place.
This game requires you to have both an Architect's insight when it comes to a secure as well as comfortable design of the interior and exterior and a Police Man's reflexes - even though the game has varied Speed settings you can change in real time, things can get really out of hand in seconds, so you need to be ready to act fast.
Contraband, murder, brawls, escape attempts - the prisoners are up to no-good 24/7 if you don't satisfy their needs. You need to make sure they have easy access to the facilities, have a regime they can keep up with, provide them with sustinence, psychological and medical care, contact with their families via payphones and finally - recreation both in forms of media and physical excercise equipment. Thing is, if you do all that, you can't expect them to be all nice and pleasant. They'll certainly cause less trouble, which doesn't mean that they won't stab a worker in the eye and leg it while you're trying to renovate their quarters and accidentally give them a chance for escaping by demolishing the wrong wall.
Fortunately you can introduce some damage control by accepting prisoners into your prison only when you're ready to accept them or reject Maximum Security prisoners, opting for Low Security ones... but where's the fun in that? (Unless you're just starting, of course)
...of course you can do the exact opposite - create a distopian prison where needs don't really matter, the guards opress the prisoners and havoc is near-constant... that is also quite pleasant.
The game is currently in an alpha stage - at the time of writing this, I was playing the alpha6 version so many things are still bugged but the game is truly entertaining so I was able to completely overlook its short-comings. I can highly recommend this product if you're into those kinds of games - it's buckets of fun, at least for the Warden.
So what's Prison Architect you ask? It's the brainchild of Introversion Software and an Indie Game orbiting around the idea of designing a prison. How? Pretty much how the title suggests - you take the role of a prison warden and build it from the ground up - your tasks are both macromanagement by assigning positions within the prison's administration structure and micromanagement by creating facilities, assigning guard posts, managing finances and the daily schedule and much, much more, going so in-deep as to have the prisoners individually searched if you see someone carrying a knife somewhere in your peripheral vision.
As you can see in the attached video, the game's world is shown from a Bird's Eye view at all times, which is to be expected from a "Tycoon-Style" game, although I'd say it's more akin to the Dungeon Keeper series, if anything. The graphics are humorous and simplistic, akin to those of Faster Than Light, although the game can get pretty dark in tone sometimes.
Oh this is so pleasant and lighthearte-- whaaa?!? Welp, he DID kill his wife and her lover...
Guards! Set your phasers to Stun... or something!
Layin' those pipes like a Pro...
Fortunately you can introduce some damage control by accepting prisoners into your prison only when you're ready to accept them or reject Maximum Security prisoners, opting for Low Security ones... but where's the fun in that? (Unless you're just starting, of course)
Stabby-stabby time...
The game is currently in an alpha stage - at the time of writing this, I was playing the alpha6 version so many things are still bugged but the game is truly entertaining so I was able to completely overlook its short-comings. I can highly recommend this product if you're into those kinds of games - it's buckets of fun, at least for the Warden.
