UPDATE

Get locked up in your own prison in Prison Architect.

Andy runs through Prison Architect’s newest additions, and curbs a prison drug problem

Prison life is tough. I should know, I watched a documentary about it once. So it’s no surprise that the inmates in Prison Architect are turning to drugs to get them through their stretch. Narcotics were recently added to the game, bringing with them a whole new set of systems to manage. Drugs will be smuggled into your prison by visitors, and your inmates will develop a habit. The addiction gets stronger with each use, making them violent and unpredictable and ultimately sparking riots. There’s also a chance they’ll overdose and have to be rushed to the infirmary. Drugs are bad.

But there are ways to deal with the problem. Sniffer dogs can be brought in to cut supply off at the source, or you can stick addicted prisoners in solitary and force them to go cold turkey. That’ll only make them depressed and angry, though, so you might want to look into setting up a reform program. As well as a drug program, you can run courses on carpentry, kitchen hygiene and education. But it’s up to you. Part of the fun of Prison Architect is running your prison your way.

Dirty cash

Speaking of money, in March the game’s economy was given a dramatic overhaul. You now start with 30K rather than 10K, and more options to raise money were added including selling shares in your prison to investors. You also get a steadily increasing cash bonus for every day without any ‘incidents’—riots, fights, and so on. Keep your inmates in line for ten days and you’ll earn a cool ten grand. These changes to the finance system make the mid-game more enjoyable: you spend less time scrabbling for cash, making you feel more like a prison manager and less like an accountant.

But it’s still possible to run your prison into the ground. Failure conditions were added in April, including bankruptcy. If you’re in the red, you get 24 hours to turn things around, otherwise it’s game over. These fail states can be disabled, but they

Inmates will be rated on several factors, giving them more personality

do make it feel more like a game.

If there are too many deaths in your jail as a result of poor planning or lack of staff, you’ll be charged with criminal negligence and become an inmate in your own prison. Here you can wander around and explore the prison you’ve built, and even try to escape—although you’ll likely be tasered and thrown into solitary confinement. Other fail states include leaving riots raging for so long that the National Guard are called in, or permitting too many prisoner escapes.

Thankfully there are also new ways to keep order. Armed guards were added in January and have a strong ‘suppression’ effect on inmates, keeping them in line and making them less likely to misbehave. Guards will only fire if you press the ‘weapons free’ button (unless their lives are threatened). The downside is that they cost a lot more than regular guards, and their armories will be targets for violent criminals. Filling your prison with guns is as dangerous as it sounds, but you only really need gun-toting guards for high population and maximum security jails.

But my favorite new feature is the addition of escape tunnels. Inmates with the ‘clever’ trait are the most likely to try to dig their way out, and having a high ‘freedom’ need will trigger it. They’ll need a digging tool of some kind, which they can smuggle out of the cafeteria, and they’ll dig along water pipes where possible. To combat this, a new wall type, the perimeter wall, can be built to keep them in. They can still dig through these, but much more slowly. Dogs can sniff out tunneling prisoners too, or you can search them or their cells to reveal its location.

One of my biggest problems with the early alpha builds of Prison Architect was your prisoners’ lack of personality. They had no quirks or traits to set them apart from their fellow inmates, but the new prisoner grading system does a decent job of countering this. Depending on how you treat them, and what they get up to, inmates will be rated on several factors: punishment, reform, security and health. These give each prisoner a little more personality than before, although I’d still love to see the addition of unique ‘hero’ characters: powerful mob bosses, notorious escape artists, etc.

Prison Architect is shaping up very well. With every big update, the complexity increases, but never to the point where you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to keep tabs on. It’s a really fun, deep sim game, and reminds me a lot of the Theme series in its heyday.