If you ever wanted to know what "5 Nights at Freddies" plus "Papers please" plus the Gym from GTA San Andreas plus several other minigames would be like while being a Guard at "Prison Architect", well, now you can. It's kind of amazing how it can combine all of that with a halfway decent presentation, and a wild story, and yet...I somehow never really got into it.
Every day you, aIf you ever wanted to know what "5 Nights at Freddies" plus "Papers please" plus the Gym from GTA San Andreas plus several other minigames would be like while being a Guard at "Prison Architect", well, now you can. It's kind of amazing how it can combine all of that with a halfway decent presentation, and a wild story, and yet...I somehow never really got into it.
Every day you, a faceless, nameless nobody, start out in the locker room with a list of tasks to fulfill, broken up with "free time" where you can raise your stats or make some money on the side. It's all explained rather well, controls fine and gives you all the beaurocracy, rubberstamps and monitor staring, occasional brawls, toilet searching and floor cleaning you could wish for. What it doesn't do is telling a story beyond the absolute minimum, making prisoners and guards feel like robots and everything else like a sideshow.
It even throws in some customization and light management, but that is mostly a number game, heavily restricted by a level system and mostly there to give you an incentive to earn money, for yourself and the prison. It's one of those games that has everything it promises, but the mechanics have no depth and are only loosely connected while being seemingly unrelated to the story. No matter how fancy your prison gets and how highly respected you are, the story seems to play out just the same, and nobody is happier or less likely to misbehave.
So in the end you are working through lists up to the point where it starts to feel like work. If you like games like that because you hate your free time and want to be told what to do for less than minimum wage at home this might be exactly what you are looking for. If you are looking for anything beyond that, you might be surprised by the quantity of content and the polish (relative to what you normally get with anything called a "simulator"). But what you won't find is an actual *game* or anything engaging except for running after achievements.… Expand
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