Between them are a Stalag, Shankton State Pen, a jungle jail, and San Pancho, south of the border in a cloud of heat and anger. The first has cable TV in all the rooms, the last has security cameras. Each of the nine prisons offers a different-feeling challenge though, not to mention new settings, from minimum security with a cell conveniently located right by a service corridor, to a high-security facility for those who have officially transcended mere scamphood. You can only save at the start of each in-game day, and while there’s no death, being taken out by a random prisoner deciding they don’t like your face, or a guard screwing up your plan at the last second, can make for an excruciating time-out and loss of hard-earned progress.

It takes a long series of days to gather and assemble the bits that you need for an escape, and it’s easy to lose all the important ones with just the slightest mistake. How much you appreciate the result will primarily depend on two factors: whether you like being left alone to figure out what to do, because the basic tutorial covers very little of what you need to know to actually escape one of the real prisons, and how annoying this repetition is going to be over time. Social times like dinner, meanwhile, offer a chance to chat with other prisoners, recruit assistance, and collect mini-quests like retrieving someone’s stolen DVD or causing a scene during the next roll-call. Soon I realized it’s also a great time to sneak into other prisoners’ cells and carefully pocket anything good from their stash.

Morning roll-call is time for everyone to gather and be told the business of the day, including whose cells are about to be inspected for contraband. It’s a game that looks like Prison Architect’s black-sheep brother, but plays about as a regimented sandbox to first be controlled by, and then to subvert.

Unblocked games the escapists