Prison Architect adds disasters in surprise Perfect Storm DLC

Heatwaves, lightning storms and rats

The latest DLC for Prison Architect was both announced and released yesterday. It’s called Perfect Storm and it adds ‘Calamities’ to the game – disasters which can befall your prison that you need to build contingencies for and overcome. That includes weather such as lightning storms, heatwaves and snow storms, but also rat infestations.

Here’s a trailer which introduces some of the calamities:

The prisons you construct are a house of cards, and these disasters can topple them like dominos – checkmate! Lightning can strike guards and inmates, knocking them unconscious, or cause structural damage that leads to flooding.

If one of these fates should befall you, you can call in pest control, plumbers, repairmen and so on for assistance. It’s better if you plan for these potential disasters in advance, however. You can check forecasts to get warning of potential weather, and train your existing staff in cold control, pest removal and so on. There are disaster relief grants, too.

As DLC for Prison Architect goes, I like the sound of this more than most. As a management game, Prison Architect is about building contingencies and redundancies to account for things going wrong with your inmates. New layers for that planning onion is what I want, rather than adjunct growths on the side of the onion a la Island Bound. You can grab Perfect Storm from Steam for £7.19/€10.

Also, this is a Paradox-published game, so the DLC launched alongside a new free update for all players. Called “The Tower”, the free update adds new foliage, floor types, search dogs and allows snipers to fire rubber bullets. You can find the full patch notes here.