Prison Architect [official site] emerged from its long stint in Early Access earlier this year and recently clinched the Best Management Game accolade in RPS’s Advent Calendar 2015. Now it has, finally, added female prisons. Luckily, there’s more to it than simple sprite swapping, as Introversion’s Chris Delay and Mark Morris detail in the accompanying video featured below.

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What is the best management game of 2015? The RPS Advent Calendar highlights our favourite games from throughout the year, and behind today’s door is …

Prison Architect!

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As far as Early Access games go, Prison Architect [official site] is one which did it right. Over three and a bit years, developers Introversion Software have added, tweaked, and tuned, and now it looks and plays now so very different. It may have left Early Access and formally launched in October, but Introversion are still fiddling away and yesterday released the first post-release update to add even more. Naturally, they have another long video developer diary explaining what’s new too:

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I never intended for that picture to become the official header for What Are You/We All Playing This Weekend, you know. I found myself in charge of this section one week and thought I’d find a nice picture of a pond – which was where I intended to mostly spend my weekend. Finding nothing in antique illustration archives (we have our whole antiquated Britishness schtick, yeah?), I turned to what else> I’d be doing: appearing in visions, indulging my nymph side, and firing cannons at ghastly moustaches.

Anyway, what are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re into:

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I can’t stop fighting. I wonder if this is a common feeling for prisoners, but in my case it’s literal. No matter how many times I press it, the button to lower my fists and surrender doesn’t do anything, and even though I’m cuffed, the guards still consider me hostile. That’s how I ended up unconscious and in the infirmary; the door to my cell in solitary opened, an armed guard saw me restrained and stationary inside, and immediately shot me twice in the chest.

This was a concern, at least until I pulled the greatest escape of all. I vanished.

Prison Architect‘s escape mode is compelling, but not without its problems.

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Alice has been away this past week, and so I’d imagine is presumably playing the game of “If I swim to the other side of this loch and run away, perhaps I’ll not have to return to work on Monday.” The rest of us however remain on dry land and I’ve gathered the team to ask them what they’ll be playing this weekend. Leave your own response in the comments below.

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It wasn’t long after I attacked the officer that I was killed with a shotgun. A fight had broken out near the cell block entrance and my friend Tapper and I decided to use the opportunity to gain some prison cred by battering the guard who came to break it up. It did not go well. My character, Pratt, is now lying in the morgue and I have become> Tapper, inheriting his body in a ghostly fashion. I am locked and restrained in my cell. Through the bars I can hear the faint sounds of a riot. I am sad to be missing out.

This is Escape Mode, just one of the features added to Prison Architect [official site] for its final release. After four years in development and alpha the game is finally out. Is prison the absolute LOL sesh it is made out to be in popular television show Orange is the New Black? Or is it more like the Midnight Express? Come with me, into this dark corner of the holding cell, to find out Wot I Think. Please mind the vomit.

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I thought I was done writing about Prison Architect [official site] updates when Introversion announced that the prison management sim would leave early access on October 6th. Yet here I am again, because at this weekend’s EGX, Chris Delay and Mark Morris demoed some of the features that will be new to v1.0 – including a new escape mode.

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Prison Architect [official site] is being released. Get it? Released>. That’s a thing that also happens to prisoners. Prisoners like the sort the game is about managing>. Get it? Yeah. Prison Architect will join society on October 6th.

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The seemingly endless expanse of alpha updates that make up our coverage of Prison Architect [official site] – we’re up to Update 36 now, friends! – is coming to an end. It’s true, these collective hands of rock and paper will no longer know the gentle touch of Introversion Software’s regular patches. As we draw closer to its eventual October launch, the final Alpha update reads as follows:

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