The Prison

The Prison: making violence personal
The prison is a local multiplayer ‘mini-game’ experience that you play on your own computer with friends and only with friends, it’s not playable without any so sorry if you don’t have any this game isn’t for you. Essentially the entire game revolves around beating your friends in a variety of games and not much more than that.
Pros:
✅ Easy to play with your friends with plenty of replayability
✅ Very easy learning curve with a medium to high skill ceiling
Cons:
❌ When starting out figuring out what to do can be very confusing, this is not the same as learning the game, this is merely figuring out where to start
The game developers have built a platform on which they can endlessly expand new games on which, while at the time of writing, isn’t a lot I’m quite sure it will increase to a rather large amount in later development. What kinds of games they’ll add in the future is a good question.
Breaking friendships in even more innovative ways
By this I mean that because this game is a hotseat game and you will be playing against each other a long streak of victories will seriously upset the other player. See it like playing Mario kart but where the goal is to kill the other player. Luckily there is enough variation to be a master in one game and be rather terrible in another. As of writing, there are about 3-4 different games that all play a bit different. These are not simple shooting games or anything alike they’re almost like puzzle games as you try to figure out well who the other person is playing. This is mostly interesting since everyone is the exact same character so even figuring out where you are can be a bit of a challenge as you have to find the character that’s moving like you without alerting the other players. This makes every single game you start tense every time since there’s time pressure to find the others before they find you.
Free advice above since the game won’t tell you anything anyway
A thing I really dislike though is the fact that the game literally explains nothing, you just start existing at you’re just expected to figure it out on your own. This has taken a lot of time I would have rather spent on actually playing the game and not trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. Not only did this go for trying to figure out where to start the game. This also applied to understanding what I had to do inside the games themselves, as that often took quite a lot of trial and error before realizing what I had to do.
Another problem is the fact that while each of the games has their own settings you can modify this can only be done very inefficiently. You have to go through a door which closes after you so you have to press a button to open it again, and then you can change a single setting at a time by pressing a single button and if it loops back around, tough luck starts again. I find this and the aforementioned lack of information just lazy as it’s something that’s not hard to add and yet the availability of this is very limited and even the information that is shown is very vague and covers not even a handful of all the things you have to do to get going.
Is it worth your money?
At 6,59€ it’s not an incredibly expensive game yet its value very much depends on what your social life is like. Since like I mentioned you cannot play this game without friends as it is hotseat only. If you often have friends coming over or just lots of video game interested family the cost is most certainly justified ,however, if you don’t and often only play single player games it will be unlikely to ever see the cost justified as playing alone is basically winning instantly.
Technicalities
The Prison is a game that will most likely run on any machine you try to run it on as its graphics are incredibly simple and character movement isn’t difficult so your CPU won’t blow up either. It ran fine both on my Main PC but it also ran fine on a very old 150 euro laptop I have so really the bottom limit is that you need to have a computer.
Summary
The Prison is an intriguing yet at times frustrating hotseat experience that anyone who often plays games with others will most certainly enjoy. With a relatively low entry price, you will be trying to figure out what you are doing in no time as you get more annoyed at the fact that pressing ESC doesn’t bring up a menu. Still ,the base now exists, and the developers are adding more and more mechanics and new games for you to enjoy.
Score: 68/100
This game was provided for free by the developers, however, my opinion has not been influenced by it.
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tl;dr This game is really fun
I was looking for a little fun game to play with my friends as a warmup before we dive into the more serious lengthy RPG games we play together.
This game is perfect for that!
The whole premise of this game is that at the start of the round no one knows who is who. You try to find out which prisoner you are, but you have to make it such that others do not spot you. On the other hand you are trying to spot others. Once you know who you are, you are trying to achieve some objective and prevent others from doing so. It makes for some deep mindgames between you and your friends, trust me;)
Some modes are symetrical(you all are trying to do the same thing) some aren't (some players are cops, some are prisoners). Every mode can be customized with a bunch of settings. If you do not like some default value, you can just change it. Some of these settings really change the whole strategy of your play, so not mess with them until you have played few rounds with defaults;)
It has three completely different game modes as of now and developers plan to add more.
The graphics is surprisingly pleasing and kills are rewarding;) It has friendly, casual and light vibe, but gore is strong with this one;D
Game sessions can be very short as each round lasts usually around 1 minute, but you will play many of them!:D As I said, great warmup game..
would mistakenly stab innocent fellow prisoner again 10/10

Hidden in the prison
The Prison is not a knock off The Escapists, it’s actually a local multiplayer game in the vein of Hidden In Plain Sight. Although it is very similar, it is actually not a simple clone as it adds its own spin to the formula, which makes it a worthy addition to your collection.
Sneaky sneaky
Talking about clones, it is obvious from the screenshots that all prisoners have been cloned from a blond guy. Most of these clones are NPCs; however, some are human players. Before unmasking and killing other players, your first order of business will always be to find out who you are on the screen. The game gives no clues, you will have to figure this out by yourself by checking which of the characters reacts to your inputs.
Local backstabbing
Considering the nature of the game, there are no bots to play with. Sadly, there is no online mode either. You really need at least two local people on the same computer to play this game, up to six in one of the three mini-games on offer. Although, for the other two mini-games, it’s only up to the usual four players. In the lobby, players enter the room corresponding to a mini-game and sit on a chair to start.
Mini-game: Generators
The first mini-game puts everyone in the shoes of prisoners, and each player needs to activate three generators to open a trap door and escape. Beware, another player can steal your generator. The generators don’t reveal their new color instantly, which leaves a few moments to leave the scene before getting spotted. What can you do if you have noticed which of the prisoners was your “friend”? Well, stab them; it’s as simple as that. We truly enjoyed playing this, and screamed when an ambushed player shanked us on our way to the exit.
Mini-game: Race
The second mini-game is similar to the famous race in Hidden In Plain Sight. Players control both a prisoner trying to survive the race, and a sniper able to kill anyone. There are quite a few differences: the aim is to be the last one alive, not simply to reach the end. The end only grants faster reloading to the sniper! Otherwise, it reloads slowly – you are not limited to one bullet. So, what’s the incentive to actually move forward? Well, cops appear on the left and kill any stragglers. You can actually reveal yourself by sniping a cop that was about to kill you – now everyone knows in which lane you were. Or do they? Maybe you killed a cop in the wrong lane to mislead the competition. You can see how this can be very interesting to play.
Mini-game: Musical chairs
The third mini-game takes advantage of the prison theme. A team of players are cops, the other team are prisoners: this can be played 3 versus 3. The prisoners need to take down all cameras before attempting an escape, while the cops must stop them. To keep an eye on the prisoners, the cops can order people around them to “go sit”. They are marked with an exclamation mark; the exclamation mark can only disappear after the prisoner has found a chair to sit on. If someone is inconspicuously walking around deactivating cameras instead of sitting down, this might raise some flags…the cops can then simply shoot down human players to win the game. An additional power play comes in the form of a central button that can close all doors in the level, potentially trapping anyone that didn’t pay attention.
This cops vs prisoners mini-game was a bit difficult on the prisoners, as the cops can randomly kill NPC's without suffering any consequences. They simply have to wait for the weapon to reload. As time went on, there were less and less prisoners walking around, making it almost impossible for the prisoners to win. I sometimes think that it’s imbalanced, but it also has the advantage to force prisoners to move on and quickly take care of the cameras while the screen still looks like a beehive.
We did spend most of our time with this mini-game, because it is frankly hilarious. The cop can have a lot of fun ordering a prisoner to sit down continuously, as the human player role playing the prisoner has to keep sweating over figuring out whether this is a test or if they have been unmasked. And seeing such a person rush into a room to sit, only to realize that all the seats were already taken by NPC's? Stress level: over 9000. This added some sort of role-playing layer to the game, and we laughed a lot. Which is what these games are about, and thus why I give it a recommendation despite its caveats.
And more!
When I initially wrote this review during the Early Access, there were only three mini-games. Since then, new ones have been added, such as the gang wars in which the aim is to capture points without being seen by NPCs belonging to another faction. This quickly turns into a bloodbath as NPCs attack each other!
The game has been properly polished
(Edit: this paragraph was written during the early access, since then everything has been fixed: new game modes have been added, new NPC syles have been added and their behavior has improved. You can dismiss this paragraph here entirely) One caveat is that there are always a few NPC's stuck on a loop, sort of endlessly having a seizure. Since they don’t move around like they should, they are of no help to human players trying to blend in. Another issue that I had with the game is that since all characters are clones, even if you noticed odd activity, it is often easy to lose sight of the specific character. I don’t just mean losing them in the crowd, which is great and works as intended. But for example, in the race game, you might not even remember which lane you were looking at. For this specific mini-game, I would have preferred to see more hair colors, so that you can better study each individual character. Apart from these minor gripes that do not hinder the game in any major way, we were happy with our time with the game and only wished for more mini-games. In the lobby, there is a room with “More soon” written on the floor. Yes, please!
Verdict
If you like Hidden In Plain Sight, The Prison is a very good companion piece. It doesn’t look like much, but the mini-games available were all great to play, and we had many laughs. The generators mini-game is perfect hide & seek, the race combines mind games and trigger-happy shooting, the gang wars mini-games is a bloodbath, and finally the cops vs prisoners mini-game is tense role-playing fun. If you like hide and seek party games, this one is clearly worth a purchase.

I'd say some of the game modes worked for me more than others. But even the ones that I initially thought were a little weak really shone after taking the time to better learn the mechanics!
The mini mind games that you are constantly playing with one another is beautiful! We played with 3 people and still had a blast. So I'd reckon that's the bare minimum you're going to want to play with. The game is definitely a more-the-merrier type situation though.
My main complaint is the main menu. It wasn't immediately obvious what was going on. We thought the game had started. After a few screw ups selecting the wrong modes, or leaving one player out for a round, we eventually figured it out. It's a funny gimmick. But the initial confusion was a big turn-off.
Something to more clearly explain how to navigate that menu, or the option to switch to a more traditional menu would be greatly appreciated.
We can't wait to see what new modes are potentially added, or to try playing with a larger group!