Prison Architect is one of the strangest and most controversial turns for the management sim genre. Taking on the role of a prison warden, the player must decide how best to run their penitentiary: to maximize profits with no care for the population, or try and run an ethical facility. It made Prison Architect into one of the most compelling sim games on the market and led to a string of DLC packs, the most recent being Prison Architect - Going Green.
The aim of Going Green is simple. Rather than the grim concrete and austere colors of the usual Prison Architect experience, this time around the warden is able to introduce a bit of life into the prison grounds thanks to outdoor farming activities. The inmates are able to grow fruits and vegetables via farm fields, allotments, and orchards, adding a little taste of Stardew Valley to Prison Architect's vibe, although of course it may not be as relaxing and innocent as at first glance.
What's impressive about Going Green is the way that it fits seamlessly into the overall thematic questions of Prison Architect as a whole. Initially players may see this as a simple content pack, and at face value it could just be a bit of extra material for a management sim, but the core ideological challenge of Prison Architect is maintained. After all, is opening up green space within a prison the most effective use of space when more money could be made with additional cells and more traditional forms of prison labor?
Even the use of Going Green's individual elements fits into Prison Architect's central question, too. For someone going down the ethical incarceration route it may seem like a simple choice to add a relaxing flower garden for the prisoners to maintain, but less so turning a profit on the goods grown by the prisoners before sending them back to their tiny cells. Even the clean energy sources added to the game, such as windmills and solar power, come with a conundrum: the player can sell the excess back to the power grid, but is it right to do so from within a facility created to the state?
All of these new features fit well into Prison Architect from a gameplay perspective, too, although there's nothing that is particularly exciting. Inmates can now grow new contraband using the garden facilities which the player will need to keep an eye on, and the various allotments and orchards add a nice new element to the game's prison labor mechanics. However, it doesn't quite become a major game changer in the way that some players may expect, and lacks any new kinds of meaningful choices.
Overall Prison Architect - Going Green is a strong addition to the core game. It follows up on the same pertinent questions about the prison system that the main title provides, with some decent mechanics around its agricultural concepts. It's certainly something that fans of the original Prison Architect will want to pick up.
Prison Architect - Going Green is out now for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Screen Rant was provided with a PC code for the purposes of this review.
