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Prison Architect release date is October 6th, currently tunnelling to freedom through five hundred yards of foulness

Prison Architect

“That’s it, we’re done!”, say Introversion, throwing down their picks and walking away from Early Access, only to find they’re still chained to their rocks. “Well we’re not done, we’re working like crazy to finish all the secret features that are going to make version 1.0 of Prison Architect epic.”

The contents of that momentous patch will remain a mystery until EGX this Saturday, during Introversion’s 2pm UK dev session. But Prison Architect’s final alpha update, released at the end of last month, introduced an optional random event system – the precipitator of incidents, disasters and unpredictability found in any finished management game worth its salt.

There’s an air of finality around Introversion’s prison sim, after three years of open development and millions of sales. But though the game might be done, Introverison aren’t: they’re planning to continue their cycle of monthly updates beyond release, with new videos to accompany each patch.

Now back to those disasters, since we’re all still thinking about them. They range from workshop accidents, kitchen fires and sudden intakes of new inmates, to mayoral demands, viruses and mass assassinations.

(The best possible outcome of that last one is that the witnesses under your protection live out the rest of their lives “holding their breath every time they start their cars”.)

How long have you lot been playing around with pretend penitentiaries?