Prison Architect

Prison Architect is the latest game being developed by Introversion Software, a three-man developer team mostly known for the games Darwinia and Uplink. The game puts you in charge of a prison, as you design, manage and help develop it, from a small compound with one holding cell to a huge and complex with several cell blocks.

The game starts by putting you into a skipable tutorial, which takes you through the basics, such as building rooms, ensuring your prison has water, power and food, while at the same time teasing a potential storyline further down the line.

Graphically speaking, the game has an overly simplified design, which, while being crisp and distinguishable, doesn’t add anything special to the game. The game plays from a top down perspective and all characters in-game look like fleshier and more colourful versions of stick figures with a pinch of Rayman for good measure, as the characters’ hands aren’t connected to their bodies. The rest of the assets are pretty much what you’d expect from a prison, so there’s a lot of grey, but you can use different materials for your floors which can add a bit of colour to your otherwise plain looking jail house. A neat feature of the game when it comes to visuals is that over time the buildings start to decay and become dirtier so eventually you’ll have to get people to maintain and clean up your prison.

The game fares a bit better when it comes to audio design. All sound assets are pretty realistic, from the sound of the jail doors closing, to the sound of cooking in the kitchen and even to the sound of an inmate sitting on his “royal throne” in his cell. The sounds change as you zoom out or zoom in. So when you zoom out the sounds start overlapping as you cover more of your jail with the camera, until eventually it starts becoming quieter and quieter as you keep zooming out. There are also quite specific audio queues so it’s easy to tell if there’s an incident somewhere in your jail, even if it’s not visible (you can choose to use “fog of war” when you start your game).

The gameplay revolves around providing your prisoners with their basic needs such as clothing, hygiene, food and much more, while at the same time making sure they won’t escape or cause mayhem in your jail. You meet the inmates’ needs by building specific rooms and furnishing your jail with a wide range of objects, such as beds, toilets, books and many more.  If you fail to meet their needs, the prisoners will become easily irritable and they will eventually become violent and even go as far as to start riots which can end up in a huge bloodshed. For emergencies like these though, the game provides you with ways of dealing with them by calling the respective emergency services such as a fire station, medics or the riot police.

The game gives you grants that you can get for building each main facility that your compound needs: a basic detention system, an administration centre, a cell block and buildings meant to ensure the prisoners’ well-being. For each of these the game sets certain objectives that you need to meet by using the money you receive in advance. Once these objectives are met, you’ll receive a bonus for completing them.

Researching also requires you to build specialized rooms. Hiring a warden (who needs an office) will unlock Bureaucracy which you can use to make new technologies and departments available to your prison, such as an infirmary, a morgue or even using your prisoners for labour (cleaning, cooking, doing laundry etc.). Another important component of your jail is the staff of course. To start with you will only be able to hire workers, guards, cooks and a warden, but as you progress and start using Bureaucracy, more staff options open up, such as doctors, accountants, janitors and much more. Each staff member costs a certain amount of money up front and you’ll have to pay him his daily wage too. You can also fire any staff at any given time.

Considering the game is still in alpha, the game lacks quite a bit of polish and content, so once you’re done with completing the grants, there’s not much else you can do. It also doesn’t help that once you’re done with these, earning money becomes really hard, making expanding your prison further a real chore. You get paid a certain amount by the state depending how many prisoners you have and usually, once you subtract the expenditures your jail has, you are left with around 2-3 thousand dollars for each day. That might sound like a lot, but if you take into consideration that each new facility costs at least $10,000 to build and that even at the highest speed one day takes 12 real life minutes, the game becomes really boring and tedious as you wait to accumulate more resources. There are also quite a few bugs, especially when it comes to the workers’ AI, but since the game is still in development I’ll let that slide.

The biggest gripe I have with the game is the slow progression of development. Prison Architect was released for early access one year ago and it’s been in alpha ever since. In this time the game has raised over $7 million dollars. You’d think that with such a huge success the game would have been able to at least reach beta status by now but it hasn’t. On the contrary, it seems to be progressing really slowly and if the current pace is maintained it will take at least another 2 years before the game will be fully finished. I believe the developers really need to get their things straight and fix their schedule really fast, or they’ll end up upsetting the people that contributed and put their faith in them. As it stands now, despite it being a promising title, the game lacks the content and the developing pace to make it worth the asking price of $30. 

Cirstoiu Alexandru Constantin, NoobFeed