As it should be obvious from the title, Prison Architect is a prison management simulator. The game puts the player in the shoes of an investor seeking to build a profitable prison through a combination of humanitarianism and harsh enforcement. The objective? Sell your prison for a profit and start all over again with a higher budget until you get bored of increasingly gigantic facilities.
The concept is great for a management sim. Prisoners are a ticking bomb if their needs are not met and some are just lunatics that find joy in causing wanton destruction. The player can also cut corners to an inhumane degree in order to make the prison as profitable as possible and you are always in an arm's race to find contraband and prevent escape attempts.
That being said, I'm only giving Prison Architect a positive review because the old 2018 version is still playable as a beta and the awful, useless, marketing tumor known as the Paradox launcher can be bypassed by editing the launch parameters.
Paradox have done a number on this game, the current vanilla version is a mess. You seriously can't find the items you need half the time because there are multiple redundant versions of some base game items and I could swear the game is somehow buggier than the 2018 beta.
As of late 2023 the final update looms closer and it seems like the game will remain in its sorry estate forever, but at the very least you can still cling to the past and play the version of the game that had potential rather than the one that fills you with regret of what could have been.