Prison Architect: a review after one late night
I made possibly a poor life choice yesterday. I purchased the Humble Indie Bundle 12, a pack of indie games purchased as part of a pay-what-you-want model. It had at least three games that were on my Steam wishlist, so it seemed like a good deal.
(I paid a ton of HabitRPG gold for this reward, so I suppose you can consider that my apology for what I'm about to write)
And then I spent the evening playing Prison Architect.
Which is kind of like a simulation game for terrible people. Which I am, naturally.
The introduction/tutorial is... weird. It throws you right into the game, without even a menu; suddenly you're answering a call from the CEO of the prison. (Prisons have CEOs? I guess private ones do...) The introduction manages to somehow teach you astonishingly little about the game, while also being full of cartoon sex and violence. At the same time (!), it tells this poignant story about a this death row inmate you're building an execution chamber for.
The whole time I'm building this execution chamber while listening to this story of inmate, I kept thinking... "Am I being punked? Should I architect it such that this guy escapes? Will I lose if I let this guy get executed? I mean, this is an indie game, it could totally do that."
(I played Frog Fractions and The Stanley Parable recently, so perhaps I went in expecting to be trolled by the game).
But no, it remains a game for terrible people. I was actually worried they were going to show me this guy getting electrocuted, but thankfully, they did not. Knowing the developers are British, this fascination with the death penalty and a distinctly American prison system is... something.
Anyway! After that unsettling introduction, the rest of the game is mostly a sandbox, which is the sort of game I love. I started building my first prison with very little guidance. Perhaps it's not surprising that I then lost most of my prisoners to, oh, running away, or riots, because no one ever told me I should build a fence, or hire guards. Maybe obvious? But there are lots of dumb things about AI behaviors, so I thought that maybe there was a magical-mystical fence around this plot of land, if I thought about it that much at all. I was also too busy trying to figure out how to build a canteen and kitchen and what kind of flooring to put in the warden's office. The prisoners might be escaping, but at least the warden had his parquet.
Also no one mentioned grants. Or that you can control what type of prisoners you intake. Or any number of things I didn't realize until I pulled up some tutorial videos.
I guess my executive summary is: I highly recommend this game, though you kind of have to have teach yourself. Also you should probably have a taste for the macabre.
(I paid a ton of HabitRPG gold for this reward, so I suppose you can consider that my apology for what I'm about to write)
And then I spent the evening playing Prison Architect.
Which is kind of like a simulation game for terrible people. Which I am, naturally.
The introduction/tutorial is... weird. It throws you right into the game, without even a menu; suddenly you're answering a call from the CEO of the prison. (Prisons have CEOs? I guess private ones do...) The introduction manages to somehow teach you astonishingly little about the game, while also being full of cartoon sex and violence. At the same time (!), it tells this poignant story about a this death row inmate you're building an execution chamber for.
The whole time I'm building this execution chamber while listening to this story of inmate, I kept thinking... "Am I being punked? Should I architect it such that this guy escapes? Will I lose if I let this guy get executed? I mean, this is an indie game, it could totally do that."
(I played Frog Fractions and The Stanley Parable recently, so perhaps I went in expecting to be trolled by the game).
But no, it remains a game for terrible people. I was actually worried they were going to show me this guy getting electrocuted, but thankfully, they did not. Knowing the developers are British, this fascination with the death penalty and a distinctly American prison system is... something.
Anyway! After that unsettling introduction, the rest of the game is mostly a sandbox, which is the sort of game I love. I started building my first prison with very little guidance. Perhaps it's not surprising that I then lost most of my prisoners to, oh, running away, or riots, because no one ever told me I should build a fence, or hire guards. Maybe obvious? But there are lots of dumb things about AI behaviors, so I thought that maybe there was a magical-mystical fence around this plot of land, if I thought about it that much at all. I was also too busy trying to figure out how to build a canteen and kitchen and what kind of flooring to put in the warden's office. The prisoners might be escaping, but at least the warden had his parquet.
Also no one mentioned grants. Or that you can control what type of prisoners you intake. Or any number of things I didn't realize until I pulled up some tutorial videos.
I guess my executive summary is: I highly recommend this game, though you kind of have to have teach yourself. Also you should probably have a taste for the macabre.