When the prisoners start to fight, my guards will immediately jump into the fray. Guard dogs help to sniff out prisoners attempting to tunnel their way to freedom. When I’m worried that too many prisoners might have contraband like drugs, alcohol, or weapons hidden in their cells, I can send my staff on a search. In peaceful moments, I station them around the prison and send them on circular patrols. My first responders against inmate misbehavior are my guards. Even with the rioters surging across my prison, I had the tools to take control. I was far from helpless in that situation, though. I had a strong urge to knock everything over and start fresh. By the time my new building was ready for inmates, there was an all-out riot in the prison yard. Even my guards were getting beat or up killed as they escorted prisoners to and from meals. Prisoners were getting shivved in the canteen. Fights were breaking out every day in the holding cell. While I was playing with my wooden blocks, the inmates became increasingly unhappy. I got tunnel vision as I laid out plumbing for the toilets and showers, envisioned wide hallways for my guards to patrol, and carefully placed the entrances. I was blinded by all the cash I was making by accepting more prisoners, so I started a grand new construction project: a massive new cell block. Looking back, I should have limited the number of incoming prisoners long before that point to forestall my looming overpopulation problem. The holding cell that temporarily houses incoming criminals was overflowing because I just didn’t have enough space. I had twice as many inmates as my facility could handle safely. No matter how much I play nice with them with amenities and luxurious extras, though, they’re always on the lookout for a way to escape, and they rarely pass up a chance to take out their frustrations on each other.Īt one point, I had a serious overpopulation problem. Inmates have a set of needs and desires ranging from food and hygiene to entertainment and drugs, and they’re more or less docile when those needs are met. The prisoners, on the other hand, don’t want to be there, and nothing I can do will ever change that. In a typical sim, the population might be a little finicky, but they’re generally happy to be my citizens-at least until I summon a meteor shower. That’s a big mistake, because the inmates cause no end of problems. Unfortunately, bad things happen when I get a little too absorbed in my construction projects and neglect the people inside them. The depth of the visual simulation adds welcome appeal to the game’s low-res aesthetic. I get engrossed watching them deliver construction materials from storage before they build out my design square by square and haul in large single pieces like appliances and doors to finish everything off. In Prison Architect, workers construct everything sequentially. In many sims, buildings magically fade into existence as I lay them out.
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Then I connect power and water lines as necessary, supply the necessary staff, and customize the building with optional extras like windows and flooring. A kitchen, for example, needs a minimum of four refrigerators, four stoves, and a trash can. Then, I designate spaces inside for specific functions and provide the basic objects it needs to work. Whenever I make a new building, like a cell block or a cafeteria, I first lay out the foundation and the walls. On the surface, it provides me yet another playground for making mischief in the lives of virtual people, but the longer I play, the more I get invested in the challenges of running a safe, riot-free facility that effectively rehabilitates criminals into contributing members of society. I’m playing Prison Architect, a management sim that tasks me with the construction and daily operations of a prison. The latest sim in my collection somehow pushed me out of these destructive habits, though. And I never could manage a playthrough in Black & White without teaching my creature some hilariously bad habits. I delighted in making the world’s most unsafe amusement park attractions in Roller Coaster Tycoon. I remember using cheat codes in SimCity 2000 to unleash devastating floods on my burgeoning metropolis. I totally understood his joy in smashing wooden block constructions, because that’s exactly how I’ve played sim games my entire life. Again and again, he’d gleefully smash everything I created, sometimes not even waiting for me to stack more than one block on top of another before giggling adorably and ruining yet another structure. It didn’t really matter what it was, because his favorite part of the game was to knock the blocks over. Then, I’d start building something: a tower, wall, a pyramid, whatever. I’d sit on the carpet and prop him up between my legs facing a pile of wooden blocks. Here’s a game I played with my son when he was little, before he could even walk.