Parents' Guide to Prison Architect

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.