Fights will occur between prisoners resulting in accidental deaths sometimes – raising penalties for your management and making the valuation of your prison drop to zero in no time. Some prisoners will dig tunnels to exit your facilities as well, so you’ll need to have regular patrols along your perimeter to reduce the risk of this happening. And ultimately, it guides you, gives you direction so that you do not drown yourself in the ocean of options the game provides.Īs the prison grows, the game will put more pressure on you: there will be drugs or weapons traffic in your prison, prisoners may get more and more upset by their living conditions and start riots that could easily go out of control and result in prisoners escaping. Grants are a great way to bring you some positive cash flux, while ensuring you spend your resources to grow your prison both in size and capabilities. Such programs can involve inmates labor, which can be turned into cash as well (or reduce the amount of work that befalls your staff, by putting the inmates to work in the kitchen!). Or you could decide to work for the well-being of your inmates by providing them education and rehabilitation programs. The Deployment view can let you organize patrols… and armed patrols.
Through the overall research tree, you could go full blown into surveillance systems, along with trained dogs and armed guards for repression. Cash is a necessary element to hire more staff and unlock many more options to control your prison and make it flourish in one way or another. For example, expanding your prison to 50 cells will be one of such goals, and you will get something like 20 000 USD to get started and you get another 20 000 USD once you achieve it. Grants act like government or private entities loans or donations, provided in exchange for you to complete a set goal.
The game makes you naturally expand your prison through a series of well thought gameplay mechanisms: the system of Grants. You can manage this level of chaos by assigning different levels of security in your prison zones – for example by regrouping your most dangerous inmates in a separate building, and ensuring that they are watched over by armed guards instead of just regular guards. Individual prisoners have their own profile and story of crimes, their own personalities – some of them more dangerous than others. It may not aim to be realistic, but in terms of simulation it goes very, very far. My new prison in the sandbox mode, after a couple of hours. There will be injured prisoners and you will have to take care of their recovery in the infirmary along with your doctor staff. After the fire is dealt with, you will have to destroy the remains and rebuild the aisle of the prison that burned – again teaching you the basics of demolition and letting you progressively experiment with the planning of your prison’s architecture. This story trope introduces you to the Emergency troops available in Prison Architect – starting with firemen. The second mission of the campaign starts with a crisis: a fire has started in the prison and you have to prevent it from spreading and save as many prisoners as possible.
Connect your electrical network to it, as well as the water system if required.Īll these steps make perfect sense, but there is definitely more manual work and mental training needed compared to your usual City building game, for example.Add the necessary items needed in that particular type of room.Define the purpose of your building’s interior by assigning a “room” type to it.Position one of several entrances (such as doors).First, start with the foundations on a surface of your choosing.This kind of thing would become trivial later on, but at first it teaches you the usual flow for building construction: You start in the first mission by constructing an execution chamber for a inmate sentenced to the death row.
Its goal is to make you learn how to play the game step by step, and it does it remarkably well.
The campaign mode in Prison Architect is basically nothing but a long tutorial with a little story attached to it. If you are expecting a RTS-like campaign mode that will take dozens of hours to complete and justify buying the game in itself, you would be disappointed. Now, the situation has changed with the official release of the game, and the addition of a Campaign mode.Ĭampaign? Maybe the name is confusing. I gave it a shot last year when it was still in Early Access and while it was certainly playable, there was no real tutorial and I had no intention at the time to learn everything about the game by going through the official wiki or something.