Prison Architect

Fri 09 Oct 2015, 00:00

This is a lovely little game.

You build your own prison. That sounds easy right? Yeah it kinda is, you just place some walls (and foundation), cells (and jail doors), beds (and toilets), kitchens (and canteens) and showers (and drains.)

Once your prison is built, you need to manage the economy, the laundry, the prisoner intake, min/med/max security distribution, the hygiene, the safety and a whole bunch of stats. This game can get crazy fast, but it's very very fun.

Even if you're not a simulator game kind of guy, there is a campaign in the game nowadays. It's a short one, just 5 missions, but it's fun and quite dramatic I must say. The story does kind of get to you and might just make you think.

Once the campaign is done though, the whole charm to me, is the sandbox mode and creating your own prison. My prison is currently at 500 prisoners, consisting of roughly 2/5th's Max Sec, 2/5th's Min Sec, and 1/5th Med Sec. It's gotten pretty wild and I have now stopped with the intake so make the prison better for everyone. Once the prison has cooled down and everyone is happy, I'm gonna expand it to 1000 prisoners (for a achievement.)

Anyway, go get the game. It's currently 33% off on Steam, and is until 13 October 2015. It runs on Windows, OS X (which is what I have been playing on) and I believe Linux. The standard edition runs at €18,86 (€27,99 full price). Well worth the price. I got it many months ago for €5 on a sale, and I have so far gotten 30 hours of entertainment out of it, money well spent.

Here's some screenshots from today's session.

Crowded shover, someone is dying soon:

These connections are satisfying: