So once you’ve played that mode you can build a prison from scratch with your own design. I would wholeheartedly recommend playing this campaign all the way through before attempting anything else in the game, otherwise you might get too overwhelmed. You will have ethical decisions to make throughout this story, which can be quite disarming, and upsetting, which I guess is the point. Even though the look of the game is quite cartoony, the themes delivered in the “Prison Stories” campaign are very gritty and dark, almost like the HBO show “Oz”. Be careful though because sometimes you can miss important events happening and before you know it you might have a riot on your hands whilst your concentrating on the new drinks machine in the staff room. When you have selected some building work to be done or are having some equipment delivered, you have the option to prioritise certain jobs and then you can speed up time. There are little cut scenes that go backwards and forwards in time to tell that story. This is a brilliant way of teaching you how to use the game properly, but the stories themselves are really entertaining and absorbing. There’s one where you have to build an execution area for someone who has been sentenced to death for killing his wife, or another where you have to quell a prison riot and a hostage situation, and then clean up the mess. “Prison Stories” is five narratives that weave a prison story from within your jail while teaching you the basics of running it. It can all seem daunting to start with but those clever game developers have created a fun and interesting tutorial to the game called ‘Prison Stories”. In these menus are all the sub menus you’ll need to build a room from the foundations up, to hiring and firing, to setting up an AA and drugs counselling group.

You have an easy to use menu bar at the bottom detailing your construction, running of the prison, emergencies and projects. You can zoom in with a press of the button and see close up a certain area, or you can go really close and follow a prisoner or guard or workman on their daily routine. It has a tabletop view of the whole prison area, and as you build you can see all the dorm rooms, kitchen area, yard etc. It’s a sim game and in being so it feels very familiar from the moment you begin.

Prison architect prisons dorm