Back in my Amiga days I feel in love with the various simulator games such as Theme Park and Theme Hospital. The chance to create and micro manage your own theme park and hospital was huge fun, learning how to run them as both a business and ensure the people visiting them were happy and content were great challenges and very different from the usual video game arcade action of the time. It is a genre of gaming that has been rather quiet when it comes to consoles but happily and surprisingly, the genre has returned with a bang in the form of Prison Architect for new gen consoles. But will it be a case of serving hard time or helping to rehabilitate the genre?
Developed by Introversion Software, Prison Architect really captures the very essence of the genre of micro management games, it has an incredible deep design and build system that follows an intricate rule based system on how it all works but with one of the most accessible control systems I have encountered for a game. As a result the control system you would rightly assume would be best played using a keyboard and mouse completely works effortlessly on a gaming controller without it feeling too sluggish or over complicated. It has one of the best tutorial modes I have seen in such a game as well and it is beautifully woven within the story campaign of the game, Prison Stories.
The story campaign will give the player different chapters to complete, each one telling a different story focused on the criminals within the prison and their back story. The chapters will teach and guide you on how the prison needs to work and how you will need to manage each scenario which will all come together to build your experience and knowledge to go on later and make your own prison in the free build mode. By taking different aspects of the day to day running of a prison and almost spoon feeding you the instructions on what and where to build to either deal or prevent a prison situation arising to learning what staff to hire and how to use them in the prison, the game succeeds in bringing the player into its world and removes the daunting task of learning how it all works.
The story in the mode itself would fit in well in any Netflix or HBO big time drama series, it is simply that well written and beautifully linked together that even if you are familiar with how Prison Architect works, it is well worth playing through the mode just to experience the story. The visuals may look all fun and cartoony but the story is hard hitting at times with true Machiavellian delivery as it tackles themes that as the prison Warden, you would naturally have to deal with. The opening chapter focuses on a single prisoner, Edward Romsey, who is currently on Death Row after being found guilty of double pre-meditated murder. As Warden you have been given the task of building the execution chamber required to carry out his death sentence. Of course the purpose of this opening chapter is to teach you the basics and rules of construction but the story element delivers the lesson with a punch. As you build the chamber the game will give you insight into the crime itself and the person Romsey was before he committed it before asking how you feel ethically as a player to be responsible for carrying out the death sentence before reminding you that you are not there to judge the prisoners but simply have the job of making sure they are kept in prison and their sentence carried out.
As you progress through each chapter, the game will throw at you contrasting elements of what running a prison would actually be like such as not only making sure the prison is fit for the purpose of holding prisoners but also in making sure it is well staff and that the needs of both the prisoners and the staff are catered for. Unhappy prisoners mean they could start a riot, risking damage to the prison and the staff whilst unhappy staff means they will not do their jobs correctly and could allow the prisoners to get up to no good and by no good I mean either plotting to take over the prison to escape or carrying out crimes such as drug dealing or black market shenanigans. The level of detail in every level of Prison Architect is staggering and the more you learn how it all pieces together, the more levels unlock for you to try and master such as helping to prevent drug addiction in the prison by running a drug rehab programme or running an Alcoholics Therapy programme. You will also need to focus on the basics of prison life such as a good laundry system and janitors to keep the prison clean to ensure the prison conforms to legal requirements.
Now all this sounds like a hell of a lot of levels to learn and get the hang of to really appreciate what Prison Architect has to offer, but that is why the tutorials in Prison Stories mode are so essential to play through. The control system is all based on the D-Pad for construction, Staffing, Prisoner Needs and is so instinctive to use that it almost becomes second nature. Once you have the fundamentals down it will be time to take all you have learned and actually have a crack at building your very own prison from the ground up. You can design the prison in anyway you like as long as you follow the basic build rules of what a prison needs to function and the more successful your prison is, the more money you can make in order to improve and expand your creation or simply use the funds to keep it running smoothly. It is the freedom to build and run the prison as you see fit that is perhaps the greatest strength of Prison Architect. You can run multiple prisons at a time, even selling them to invest the money into either new prisons or ones already running. Will you be a kind and forgiving Warden who focuses on making prison life as comfortable as possible for the inmates or will you build the Alcatraz of prisons where guards are strict and prison life harsh. Finding the balance is the key to maintain order and to keep the inmates from misbehaving and the prison staff happy.
A great feature is the World of Wardens mode which allows you to not only share any prisons you have built with the Prison Architect community but also to download and play the prison builds of others, and all free to do so as well. The ability to create and share prisons with other players is an ingenious way of adding more gaming content to enjoy but also great to see how other players design and build their own prisons which will help you possibly refine or adapt how you yourself are building prisons. The way in which the community has already embraced Prison Architect speaks volumes for how solid a management genre game it really is in just a single week of its release on console.
I really enjoy playing Prison Architect and could lose hours in building and running my own prisons. It ticks all the right boxes to allow access to its core features and enough room to allow your skill to grow as you learn and understand how it works the more it opens up to you with new structures and staff types becoming available. The developers have worked hard to get the basic rules of the world just right to enable the logical building of the prison without bogging the player down with them. I found this to be a great title to stream as well, getting viewers to help design a prison then to all panic if it all goes wrong and watch gleefully as you try to tackle the riot that has broken out because the quality of the canteen was not good enough for the inmates. There is a real buzz and sense of achievement when your prison is running smoothly, remembering to send the guards to do a weekly shakedown of prisoners and their cells to capture any drugs and weapons or to discover escape attempts such as prisoners trying to tunnel their way out.
If you have ever watched a prison based TV show or film, Prison Architect now delivers that experience into a video game that uses so much of what made the genre so popular back in the day, but has refreshed it for a modern audience and managed to bring it across to a console so fluidly with a natural control system that never feels over complicated for the use of a controller. This really is a great example of the genre and has lovely little aspects you will discover for yourself as you play. For just £7.99 this is really superb value for money.
Prison Architect is certainly one game I would happily do hard time to keep playing!
