Prison Architect isn’t only significant because of the final product’s quality, but also because of the nature of its development. It was one of the first games to adopt an ‘Alpha’ development model, before the creation of Steam Early Access. Over the past three years, it’s proved itself a stalwart example of this design process, receiving constant updates that have carefully expanded upon its basic premise of constructing and managing a maximum security prison. Now, finally, Introversion has officially updated Prison Architect to the hallowed version 1.0, and the result is one of the most distinctive and fascinating management sims since Theme Hospital.
That said, it isn’t quite as accessible as Bullfrog’s classic. Indeed, Prison Architect begins with a bamboozling lack of ceremony. Select New Prison mode and you’re dropped straight into a plot of virgin land with a criminally small budget and a meagre serving of instructions. Select Career mode, on the other hand, and you arrive in a comprehensive five-mission tutorial, which confusingly begins with the construction of an execution chamber so that your prison can carry out a death sentence.
Like Andy Dufresne’s arrival at Shawshank Penitentiary, Prison Architect doesn’t offer the warmest of introductions, but once you get your head around the career mode’s counter-intuitive opening, it all starts to make sense. The Career mode guides you through laying building foundations, designating room types, catering to your prisoner’s needs, dealing with riots and managing its web of bureaucracy. It also tells some surprisingly compelling tales of prison life, from the tragic execution of a repentant murderer to a misguided civil war within a mafia family.
Ultimately, though, the Career mode is little more than an overnight stay in the drunk tank. Your sentence truly begins when you construct a prison of your own, expanding from a simple holding cell with an attached canteen to a complex network of cell blocks, showers, exercise yards, managing offices, communal spaces, visitation rooms, workshops and half a dozen other facilities.
Underpinning the game is a core system in which every action you designate has to be carried out by a member of your prison’s staff, so any foundations you plot out have to be constructed manually by a team of workmen. Objects from prison doors to toilets need to be transported from storage and installed, while water pipes and electricity cables must also be laid out by hand. Cell doors must be opened by guards, meals cooked and served by chefs, and rooms cleaned by janitors. Even your prison psychologist has to attend therapy sessions in person.
As such, the construction of your prison takes time, and the delay between action and resolution means some mental gymnastics are required to keep your prison running. Money, for example, is extremely tight, but you can acquire large chunks of funding through grants, which fund your prison for meeting certain requirements such as ensuring your prisoners receive sufficient family time. Many of these grants pay advances, so a common trick is to accept a new grant and use the advance to complete a previous grant project, and then use the funds paid for completing the old grant project to start a new one.
Alongside finance is the issue of looking after your inmates. All your prisoners have a list of needs, ranging from food and hygiene to vaguer requirements such as safety and company. These needs intensify the longer they go unfulfilled. For every day you put off the construction of the new shower block, you get several dozen prisoners becoming increasingly irritated by the smell of their armpits. Eventually, such neglect will lead to fights, murders and full-blown riots.
Playing Prison Architect is an exercise in plate spinning, and it’s only a matter of time before one crashes to the ground. It might be that you forgot to add enough capacitors to your power generator, resulting in a blackout that triggers multiple escape attempts. Or perhaps you might have neglected to search the prisoners’ cells, causing a spate of drug addictions, opportunistic shankings or the digging of escape tunnels. Even doing what’s expected, such as giving regular shakedowns, can cause unrest to increase, sparking off further problems down the line.
The attention to detail in Prison Architect’s systems is remarkable. Every action feeds into the simulation and spits out a noticeable result at the other end. There are a couple of issues, however. The level of interconnection means even a small bug can potentially spike your entire prison. In our game, a door became stuck shut for no apparent reason, sealing off an entire wing of the prison from all the basic amenities for several days. Fortunately, the wing was newly built and there were no prisoners residing in it, otherwise it would definitely have caused a riot.
Also, while Prison Architect is great at producing emergent stories, they don’t tend to be stories about individual prisoners, despite the fact that each prisoner has an extensive background and a list of traits attached to them. That’s partly because unfulfilled needs tend to affect your prisoners en masse, and partly because there’s so much going on at any given moment that individual prisoners tend to be neglected, a curiously fitting indictment of mass incarceration that we doubt is entirely accidental.
Indeed, what’s perhaps most impressive about Prison Architect is how it uses its theme to create a fun and engaging game without diminishing or exploiting its dark subject matter. The art style might sport a light-hearted, cartoony vibe, but when 20 of those prisoners are slamming themselves against a prison door, screaming about their crippling drug withdrawal, the aesthetic qualities have the all the softening effect of a boxing glove on a fist.
Prison Architect isn’t preachy, and carries no message per se, but it never shies away from the darkest aspects of prison life. You can treat your prisoners like human beings, rehabilitating them as they serve their sentences. Alternatively, you can exploit them for capital gain, sending them to toil endlessly in workshops, or squeezing them into tiny cells to rake in more money from the state.
Any game that communicates a meaning and sense of purpose entirely through its systems is always worth investigating, and Prison Architect is absolutely one of those games. It may not be the friendliest management sim around, but it’s richly complex, unique and fascinating. RICK LANE