"Fun for a few hours" is a pretty cruel thing to say about a game with well over a few hours of playtime, but unless you get super into the micromanaging aspects of this game, I feel like there isn't much to the prison building beyond following the grants and keeping needs low. This might just be the early game bias, but I feel like it'd take a good deal of incompetency/greed to actually have more than a few escapes/deaths, let alone a riot. This is all, of course, ignoring the elephant in the room that is the fact that this game is built around making an extremely unethical and very real job into a fun video game. I'm not enough of a puritan for this to be a dealbreaker to me, but (unless there's something in that campaign mode I didn't feel like finishing) the game doesn't really engage with the ethics of any part of the prison system at all, let alone come to a definitive stance on it. Apathy towards an issue is typically seen as complacency with the status quo, so if that seriously bothers you, skip this one.

Reviewed on Jan 18, 2024


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