Prison Architect
By Chad Sapieha,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Deep prison simulation with violence, blood, sex, profanity.
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Prison Architect
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What’s It About?
PRISON ARCHITECT attempts to make enjoyable a task that most people probably wouldn't think of as much fun: building and managing a private prison. Its story missions -- which tell tales of criminals, mobsters, and corrupt officials -- lead players through the basics of building and maintaining a prison. You'll learn how to construct specific types of rooms, how to manage power and water, how to deal with staffing and bureaucratic concerns, and how to cope with emergencies such as fires and riots. You'll even have the option of improving prisoners' lives by starting therapeutic programs and helping the guards rest and recuperate by constructing staff facilities. Once finished with these lengthy episodes, the real game begins. You'll get to build a prison from scratch, which includes clearing out a patch of natural land, designing and building each and every structure, and picking a warden and planning guard patrols. You can set your own modifiers, making the game as easy or as difficult as you like. Completed prisons can be uploaded and shared with the game's community.
Is It Any Good?
To get the most out of this strategy game, you need to be willing to spend the first five or six hours just learning how everything works. The designers have done a good job of injecting some narrative elements into these tutorials to keep them interesting, but this part of the game is nonetheless pretty linear. Once you get through that part of the experience, things start to loosen up, providing a wealth of freedom which you'll be fully trained to make the most of. You could just start playing around in the sandbox mode prior to completing the story missions, but you'd likely find yourself woefully lost as to how much of anything works.
That's not to say the game is poorly designed. Far from it. Its makers have done a terrific job of making all the menus intelligible and intuitive. But these menus create a massive web of interconnected systems that requires some instruction. Without working through at least a few good examples, it's hard to know the proper contexts in which to properly exploit buildings, staff, and infrastructure -- such as the intricacies of the water and power systems, both of which are a bit finicky but vital for prisoners' health, safety, and contentment. But if you take the time to properly learn about these parts of the game in the tutorial, you'll likely be itching to put your newfound knowledge to work constructing, staffing, maintaining, and managing your own penitentiary. And if somewhere along the way you discover you've learned something about the complexities and problems confronting real-world prisons, all the better.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the impact of violence in media. Why are violent games often so popular? Do you feel different when playing games in which your character is the one carrying out violent acts versus those in which you merely witness acts of violence by nonplayer characters?
Discuss the concept of prisons, including their place in our society and how they're managed. Do you think they should be run by the government or by private enterprise? What sorts of rights should prisoners have while serving their sentences?
Game Details
- Platforms: PlayStation 3 , PlayStation 4 , Windows , Xbox 360 , Xbox One
- Pricing structure: Paid
- Available online?: Available online
- Publisher: Double Eleven
- Release date: June 28, 2016
- Genre: Simulation
- ESRB rating: M for Blood, Drug Reference, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence
- Last updated: July 18, 2016
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