Prison Architect is a construction and management simulation game in which the players get to build a private prison and manage its functioning, at the same time, in every little detail.
Prison Architect is incredibly addictive. I've played it since its early access stage on Steam, and even if I currently have more than one hundred hours of playtime, I feel like there are still a lot of things that I haven't discovered about it. Plus, updates were really consistent and brought a lot of novelties to the game since I started playing it. It's no coincidence that it's just as addictive as the old Bullfrog productions of the 90s (like Theme Hospital), as it's inspired by those games and resembles them in many aspects, so it's no wonder that it got record sales and almost unanimous positive reviews.
The main reason why it's so addictive is, in my opinion, its complexity. There are so many aspects that you have to take care of in order to be able to manage your prison successfully, that you won't have a moment to rest your train of thought, let alone get bored. Every prisoner comes with unique traits, such as distinct security levels or special attributes, and no individual can be treated superficially. There's also your staff, utilities, rooms, the prisoner's needs, the regime and the programs, and so many other things to look after. Maintaining the right balance between all these aspects is key to having a functional prison, but it's also really difficult to achieve. Anyway, if you just go with the flow and stop caring that much, even watching your prison failing and succumbing to riots and violence is still somehow fun and captivating.
There are also different game mods and user-generated content, a story mode and an escape one, and the latest update also uncovered the existence of a previously-hidden 3D mode.
To sum it all up, Prison Architect is an amazing experience that comes to prove that games can still be great even when they come without sophisticated visuals. It's an awesome game that I recommend with all my heart.
v1.5 [Mar 30, 2016]
-Now defaulting to the VS2015 build, with the old VS2008 build still
available for Safe mode (Prison Architect Safe Mode.exe). This gives
a good speed improvement over the VS2008 version.
-Asynchronous job search system. Instead of synchronously looking for a job,
workers, guards, prisoners, doctors now place a request for a new job in a
queue. This queue is processed during render phase of the game loop so
shouldn't take up any time during the main game loop.
-Speed up rendering of the Feed Prisoners Objective. This was particularly
slow when their were a lot of hungry prisoners.
- Rebuild the indoor/outdoor shadow mask only when a cell changes its material
or indoor/outdoor status.
- Continued improving Thermodynamics
- 3d mode has been discovered
- Various bug fixes
