Did you ever feel like being the boss of a prison full of inmates? Or maybe you just want to be a psychotic architect who puts crazy inmates together? Well, then it’s your lucky day! With ‘Prison Architect’ you can do all that and even more!

The title of the games says it all: you’re the architect of a prison with a lot of inmates you need to run. When you start the game, you can choose what kind of ‘boss’ you’d like to be. There are a lot of different characters, you can be an ex-inmate, a cop, a fierce female boss or the crazy scientist. All these characters have their own background stories and traits.

There are a lot of different characters you can choose from.

You can start your game with a pre-built prison or build your own. I got right into the game and started building a prison: boy what a mistake that was. You really need to figure EVERYTHING out. For example: you need to start with foundations, then you’ll need power supplies and power cables around the prison. Oh don’t forget about the water supply and draining and all that. By the time I figured out how I had to get everything in place I actually just wanted to play with inmates so I started a new game with a pre-built prison.

You’ll need to build your foundations first, and it’s actually not that easy as I thought.

After the foundations, you’ll need electricity and water supply.

The pre-built prison was very big with A LOT of inmates. There are also cops and workers running around and there are a lot of things you need to think about. You can check if the inmates have contraband or if they are doing something stupid. You can let the guards check the cells, put inmates in detention or make them work. Cool thing is that you can see everything about all the inmates: what they did, how they feel, details about age and all that and what the risks are. You also get objectives you can follow. Overall, this game is not something you pick up and play for an hour. Prison Architect is a game that takes some time to learn, is very in-depth, but is an amazing experience once you’re on the good flow!

You get a full report on the history of the inmates and what they are doing at that time.

PROS

• Cool simulator
• Very, very, very in-depth!
• Endless possibilities with building or inmates
• Multi language (mine translated to Dutch automatically)

CONS

• You’ll need to play the tutorial to get the hang of the game
• There are a lot of things happening all at once (you can pause it though)