Prison Architect

Many games live on providing the player a fantasy. Not the Tolkein brand of fantasy, but the escapism that comes from exploring a world unlike your own. Even games like Grand Theft Auto or Far Cry have their fantasies; of streetwise thugs working up to control the city or sweaty men running around a rainforest crafting dead rabbits into arrow quivers. Prison Architect has no fantasy, but instead chooses to give the player a glimpse of the reality that conflict of interest has on privately owned prisons.

It pulls no punches. Should you go through the small campaign first, which serves as a tutorial with a plot, one of the first things you have to do is prepare an execution chamber for a death row inmate. It’s monstrous, but only in its banality. When you make your own prison, you can even go on to unlock executions through hiring a lawyer. The game doesn’t tell you to do it, but you CAN. And you get payed by the murder. You control everything to the hours prisoners serve in lockdown to the amount of food they get. The quality of their cells and the luxuries they are omitted. And you have to pay for it all. It sets up the harsh disconnect that can come between running the prison like a prison and like a business.

It’s amazing how much the game can say through its incentive systems alone. By simply putting you in the position of the manager, it asks you how low you are willing to go to run a successful business. Would you rather invest money into a prison workshop than a parole office? Would it be best to make the cells as small as they can be to save space and money? The game never confronts you, but every choice you make is conflict by design, to mirror the sad, horrific world we find ourselves in.

And this isn’t saying that the game isn’t fun. It has that Lego feel of getting to put all the pieces together in the ways you want to, constructing the world you want. Getting all the facilities needed to run a prison properly is an expensive chore, but the game guides you through objectives in the form of grants. These grants give you up-front and completion funds when you finish these objectives, and these help shape your prison for the better by encouraging visitation facilities, infirmaries and shotgun-armed riot-gear-clad guards that are always watching. Always watching.

Each prisoner in your charge has various needs to meet, and a psychologist is an essential hire for collecting these into reports. It helps you realise mistakes or when your prison isn’t working properly and can point you towards making your prison a better place to live in general. People having problems with spirituality? Build a chapel and invite a spiritual leader to speak there a few hours a day. Got a problem with literacy? Build a library for the prisoners to enjoy. Being able to respond to problems more proactively stops issues before they arise and generally helps the facility run smoother. Now only A FEW corpses need to be carted off every week.

You manage to get away with allowing murder quite easily. Just send the corpse off and hire a new guard, or get a new prisoner. The janitor will clean up the blood in a few hours; he’s quite busy, you know. You can splash out for metal detectors, or perform a prison-wide shakedown every now and then, but the complex balancing act of keeping prisoners happy, costs low and income high is a constant problem that can lead to you making some grim decisions. It’s not impossible to be a good person, but you’ll find yourself struggling against the game to do so.

This isn’t sad though. I mapped out guard patrols with cheerful glee, setting up common rooms and cell blocks as my creation took shape. I expanded for a kennel and got in K-9 patrols, and unlocked surveillance cameras, got them set up. It was entertaining, exciting even. A new busload of inmates showed up for cells I hadn’t finished 2 hours ago and I zoomed in, looked at their names and offenses. I was enthralled in a game that both repulsed and rewarded me. My emphasis on what the game says about reality may have gotten in the way of the fact that this is still engaging, and an experience I was eager and willing to sink hours into.

Prison Architect is a sterling example of how a game can soak itself in meaning without making it less of a game. It has its incentive systems, its story, its harsh look into reality, but it doesn’t detract from the experience. There is fun to be had, catharsis in seeing your creation move and work with efficiency and diligence. It’s just all there, and I can’t help but recommend it.