Nothing turns a soul dark like a great strategy game. When I started playing Prison Architect

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“ Prison Architect doesn’t skimp on any of that detail. You don’t just put down buildings, but plan them.

Out In The Yard

All this makes for a surprisingly open sandbox, given the highly specific nature of the job, though it’s a sandbox where the map has to be fenced off quickly, before the first prisoner delivery arrives. The catch, paving the road to Hell with former good intentions, is that you’re running a private prison, which has to turn a profit in addition to processing criminals. That’s not too difficult early on, but the needs of a larger prison soon multiply. Buildings. Staff. Disaster recovery. It goes on. It’s not enough for instance to just put down CCTV monitors; they all have to be hooked up to a console with a guard assigned to watch, otherwise you’re still blind to what prisoners are up to.

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“ Something like a fire or a riot is just as disastrous as it should be.

Going Straight

While I say “not too difficult” though, I’m speaking relatively. Prison Architect does a dismal job of introducing itself if you just start playing, and just getting a handle on the basics can be incredibly frustrating. Start up the sandbox and you get very little to go on - a field, very little money, and a welcome letter with only the most casual introduction."The tutorial takes the form of a five part mini-campaign that does cover the basics, but more often gets carried away showing off the 'fun' stuff like how to set up an electric chair or handle a riot, when what a new player really needs to know are things like why the prisoners aren’t able to go to the canteen, when to start work on the Administration building, or that Grants are essentially the mission system that provide the money and steps rather than an advanced game feature. The details get lost in the storytelling, with the result that it's easy to become blind to key things like being able to switch off the intake to avoid having murderers twiddling their thumbs by the side of your road.To get started, you almost have to rely on wikis and often out of date guides, which is all the more frustrating because most of Prison Architect’s early game isn’t that complex. Later, when you start juggling dedicated guard patrols (anything they can’t see is hidden by Fog of War, just for starters) and handling prisoner psychology and attempting to reform instead of merely incarcerate them, that changes, and that’s fine. Throughout though, alerts and tooltips can be maddeningly vague about what things actually are and do and what rooms they’re intended to be put into.On top of the basic sandbox, there are two modes to play - that short campaign mode mentioned earlier, and Escape Mode, where you control a prisoner in either your own prison or random/subscribed ones from the Steam Workshop. Campaign is an odd mix of narrative and tutorial that’s mildly diverting, but neither particularly compelling in terms of the story it tells between telling you to build things, nor well judged in the order it covers crucial systems. I’d have preferred those vignettes to be part of the sandbox really, and a proper intro put in their place.Escape Mode can best be summed up by the fact that it’s in the Extras menu. It’s cute, but if you want that experience, play The Escapists (Review) instead. It’s a very simple game where you fight people to level up, recruit other prisoners, and regularly get let down by the maps. In the first one I tried, I ended up locked in a Holding Room forever. In the second, no guards showed up, and I was able to just walk away - or rather, into the invisible barrier at the map edge. The third and fourth worked, but only just showcase the incredibly weak combat and kill any remaining interest.Luckily, the sandbox is more than enough to carry Prison Architect. However long the appeal of building prisons instead of cheerier things like theme parks lasts, developer Introversion’s attention to detail and the depth of its focus makes for both a satisfying challenge and a fascinating simulation. Plus, if you need another reason to never, ever want to find yourself behind bars, you’ll soon find an appreciation for the mathematics of suffering right up there with anything in The Shawshank Redemption.