Prison Architect has been around for over a year although it did spend a lot of that time in an Early Access/beta form, as the developers updated the game by adding new elements, fixing bugs and making little videos about the changes to keep everyone interested in the game up to date. It eventually did have its full release and has recently updated with its second big update, which brought women prisons to the game. So, how has all that time spent in development helped the game?
First thing to note is that this is not a big game. The install is just over 500MB and the graphics are simple, which means you don’t need a massive PC to run the thing. The game also starts off the first time you open it in the Campaign mode, the first level of which previously found use as the tutorial for earlier versions of the game. I’d recommend playing through at least some of the Campaign before you go into building your own prison if this is literally your first experience with the game – it’ll teach you how to do certain actions in the game without much pressure to get it right first time. For example, the very first Campaign mission teaches you how to build new rooms/buildings, place objects within them, hook up the electricity and water, sub-divide inside areas into new rooms and how to make sure you’re not overloading the power station (the mission deliberately makes you overload it to teach you and won’t let you fix it before time, I tried!) as well as fixing it if you do.
Into the building of your own prisons and you start with a plot of land, with Deliveries and Garbage areas pre-marked out; a team of 8 Workmen and a sum of money in the bank. I’d recommend going into the Grants option in Reports and choosing the Basic Detention Center grant at least, if only because it’ll give you a list of exactly what you need to construct at a minimum to have a working prison. Grants are quite important to take to keep your money up because it’s easy to get carried away and spend too much building facilities too fast; you basically get promised a sum of money for completing certain objectives. Since most of those objectives help your prison grow and become more effective it’s in your interest to complete them as well, so by growing your prison you get access to lump sums which is useful and quite nice.
Reports is actually one of the main hubs of the game and one of the ones you will become most familiar with throughout the game. Through it you can also control your intake of prisoners and what level of security they have, the schedule for them, their meals, the scheduling of reform programs available and many more functions, although a good number of them require you to unlock their use through assigning them as research in the Bureaucracy menu first (which require certain staff members to do the researching). The game does come with the functions to speed up and pause time as well as a planning option that lets you plan out structures before you actually build them, which can be useful when you begin constructing wings of individual cells for your guests. This does allow you time to breathe and experiment with what works for you, so you rarely feel too stressed out or that things are out of your control if things go a little wrong.
That’s not to say that the game is free of its… quirks though. The main one I fell prey to a lot was the removal of interior walls through the Foundations menu’s bulldoze option. Doing this also removes the foundation block under the wall, and while it is replaceable it’s much easier to use the Material menu’s option to remove the walls so that only the wall is removed – not the foundation under it. The dogs of the dog handlers also sometimes have trouble path finding through doors although it is possible to click on the handler and direct them to take another path if you’re finding this a bit irritating. Also, despite the Update women prisoners will still have he/him pronouns for the description of their reputation traits – more of an oversight then anything else though.
Speaking of women prisoners you can choose upon starting a new game to construct a woman-only facility, as well as choosing from a number of Wardens with different benefits to them. If you decide to play a women’s prison though, keep an eye on your incoming intake – some will arrive with babies. Prisoners with babies need a special Family Cell constructed for them to reside in, as well as the Nursery so they can take meals separately from the main prison population. Other than this though there are few gameplay differences to a women’s prison as opposed to the men’s one, although it is nice to hear that they added in female voices for prisoners that you’re able to hear if you zoom in closely enough.
So how has the long time spent in Early Access done for Prison Architect? Actually it’s done it a lot of good. It allowed the developers to get feedback that they could then use to tailor their game to the audience’s desires, it allowed for the fixing of (most) bugs and those that remain are not game-breaking. While there are some things that do need improving (see the dog path finding) I didn’t find they distracted from my playthrough, and I’ve actually started a number of prisons to make this review. If anything, some of the quirks made me laugh out loud, like the time I watched a doctor yank an injured prisoner out of bed upside down to administer healing or the time when a pathfinding quirk saw my Accountant and Foreman stuck in the Staffroom door in a somewhat compromising position.
If you enjoy games that let you build and manage facilities, you’re going to love this game.
9/10.
