A hard cell

There are management games and there are micro-management games.Prison Architect 2is the latter.

Unsurprisingly for a sim about prison, it encouraged obsessive control.

The 3D-ified sequel isn’t finished yet, but it’s taking a similar approach.

Prisoners crowd into the yard, where some punching bags hang unused.

Maybe a little too similar.

One of the memorable joys of the firstPrison Architectwas its ability to generatedaft stories.

But there were enough hints of trouble to reassure me that similar shennaigans were afoot.

An aerial view of a large urban prison complex.

The health benefits of natural surroundings be damned.

But that is all I have right now.

The seeds of disaster.

Staff of a prison relax in the yard intended for inmates.

It takes a long time to get things up and running, what with all the wall-building.

But it is taking me noticeably longer to feel the emergence of those anecdotes.

There’s a lot of switching back and forth between menus, for example.

A prisoner called Dicky Chung paces in his cell.

The sequel feels like a chance to clean that up but so far it only rearranges the disorganised cupboards.

For a game about control, the menus simply feel hard to read and interpret.

That disorder is not the case everywhere.

A city map, showing levels available to select in Prison Architect 2.

Challenge Maps force you to build prisons with particular requirements.

That and I have doubts even about the practical need for such a change.

Thematically and mechanically, Prison Architect is about control.

A new cell block is marked for construction in Prison Architect 2.

It is about little people’s lives being directed to a tragicomically draconian degree.

For me, not hugely.

If anything, the top-down 2D view of the original allowed you to quickly parse more information.

A map shows the underlying plumbing of a prison.

To place and remove items more cleanly, to build and demolish walls more efficiently.

The ability to rotate the camera all around to get a proximate peep at your penitentiaries is cool.

But it’s also of limited value.

It even sometimes gets in the way of clean and functional click ‘n’ drag management.

Incidentally, did you know that the originalPrison Architect had a hidden 3D mode?

It was an interesting novelty, a rudimentary test by the developers.

But when it comes to running your prison, why would you ever use it?

This is the first big fence Prison Architect 2 must dig itself a tunnel under.

The direction it pushes in feels vaguely unnecessary.

It wouldn’t yet be fair to judge the game too squintingly.