Prison Simulator

Prison Simulator drops you into the role of a prison guard at a facility that is, to put it mildly, not a model correctional institution. Developed and published by Baked Games, this is a first-person management-and-action hybrid where your daily shift involves patrolling cells, breaking up fights, searching for contraband, and maintaining just enough order that nobody files a formal complaint about the body count. It sits somewhere between a workplace sim and a sandbox with teeth, and that tension is genuinely its strongest selling point. The core loop is repetitive by design, which is either a feature or a flaw depending on your tolerance for routine with occasional explosions of violence. You wake up, report for duty, handle inmate requests, conduct cell searches, respond to altercations, and clock out. Over time you unlock new responsibilities and tools, and the game quietly asks you a question it never actually states out loud: what kind of guard are you going to be? You can run a tight, fair operation, or you can lean into the corruption options, taking bribes, planting contraband, and generally becoming the type of officer that makes documentary filmmakers rich. The moral flexibility is the closest thing to an RPG system here, and while it is not exactly Disco Elysium in terms of consequence depth, it does give repeat playthroughs a different flavor. Combat, when it happens, is janky in the way a lot of indie first-person games are janky. Inmate brawls are satisfying to break up the first several times and then become a matter of muscle memory. The tool set expands gradually, giving you batons, pepper spray, and other crowd-control options, but the physics and animations never quite reach the polish level the premise deserves. Where the game does punch above its budget is in its atmosphere. The prison itself feels lived-in, the inmate population has distinct personalities and recurring faces, and there is a low-grade dread to every shift that keeps the experience from feeling completely toothless. The simulation side has more depth than the screenshots suggest. Managing inmate morale, handling requests that may or may not be cover for something worse, and balancing the warden's expectations against the practical chaos of the block gives the game a middle-management horror quality that is oddly compelling. Fans of games like Papers, Please will recognize the feeling of a system slowly grinding you down while you make increasingly compromised decisions. The writing is functional rather than sharp, and the game does not have the narrative payoff of something built around story, but it knows what it is and commits to the bit. Where Prison Simulator falls short is in long-term depth. Past a certain point the systems do not evolve meaningfully, and what felt like emergent chaos in hour three starts to feel like a scripted routine by hour ten. There is no branching story to speak of, no character arcs that reward investment, and no late-game complexity to justify extended sessions. It is a game you want to experience in concentrated bursts rather than marathon runs. The 86 percent positive Steam rating from over two thousand reviews suggests most players hit the fun window before the fatigue sets in, which is a reasonable outcome for an indie title at this scale. If you are looking for a management sim with a dark sense of humor, a sandbox for morally flexible decision-making, or just something that lets you feel the specific stress of a job you would never actually want, Prison Simulator delivers a version of that. Just do not go in expecting narrative weight or build variety that holds up past the mid-game. It is a solid afternoon-to-weekend experience from a small studio that understood its lane.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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