There’s a question that circulates in my friend group fairly often: Who among us could pull off real-life crimes? Based on my clumsiness and eagerness to fess up when I make a mistake, I’m often ruled out of the race. Still, I’ve always wondered… Do I have the grit to run a criminal organization? Well, thanks to developer Trebuchet’s quirky bootlegging simulator, Prison Boss Prohibition, I’ve finally got the answer to that question.
Prison Boss Prohibition is the successor to developer Trebuchet’s incarceration simulator, Prison Boss, and asks players to trade a life behind bars for the streets to operate a new kind of illegal gambit. Set in a poultry-packed pastiche of New York, knowingly called New Yolk City, your job is to run an illegal merchandise stand to satisfy the needs of the locals after the Mayor has gone mad with power.
To achieve this, you must split your time between crafting and selling illicit goods, upgrading your shack, and unlocking new crafting paths. Instead of guards, you must avoid the leering eye of Johnny Law to keep things running smoothly. With limited time each day to make cash, finding a way to efficiently craft while saving your pennies becomes the main consideration as you grow your influence. It’s an enticing jumping-off point that builds on Prison Boss VR’s criminal premise with its wonderfully silly setting.
Just because Prison Boss Prohibition’s world is wacky doesn’t mean Trebuchet hasn’t put the work in to make New Yolk City feel distinct from its predecessor. Each area feels wholly committed to the 1920s fantasy, and I’m enjoying taking the time to peer out of my cartoon shack and take in the reimagined sights. This attention to detail extends to the egg-shaped citizens, too, with each adorning time-coded attire like miners’ helmets and spiffy cloche hats.
If you’re worried about becoming an off-the-books entrepreneur without any training, Prison Boss Prohibition eases you in with a sizable tutorial that teaches you how to make contraband, order materials, and sell your illegal goods. Your typical day is split into three segments, morning, afternoon, and night. Each portion of the day is intended for a specific goal, which helps create a natural momentum to your play sessions.
In the afternoon, you’ll stock up and organize your working space efficiently, before time ticks over into night, where you’ll scramble to create as much contraband as possible. During the day, your customers will ram the shop with orders, and you’ll get the chance to offload your goods for a cash reward. The city has various customers with unique preferences, so as you earn more money, you’ll need to diversify your portfolio to please the masses. The focus on routines feels like a grounding touch that allows me to curate a flow while also engaging with the mayhem of running my business.
You initially start your business with a simple lemonade recipe. Fill up empty glass bottles with tap water, smash in two flowers, pop on the lid, and shake your arm violently up and down. It’s not long until you pick up a second recipe for booze, and things naturally get a little more chaotic. The process remains similar, except now you’ll shake up the bottle with two portions of wheat instead. It all sounds effortless when described, but as the clock ticks down and your arms get tired of whizzing around, it becomes extremely easy to make small mistakes. In the seedy underbelly of New Yolk, small mistakes can lead to big problems, namely, contraband confiscation at the hands of a happy-go-lucky copper doing the rounds.
Prison Boss Prohibition can be played standing up or sitting down in both mixed reality and VR. To navigate your business space, you’ll use a combination of artificial stick-based locomotion, with the option to choose between smooth or snap camera rotation.
Prison Boss Prohibition does a decent job of teaching you how to hide goods. Even so, it can take some trial and error to get it right, and I’ve taken a few silly risks to find out what constitutes a well-hidden material from a poorly hidden one. For the more cautious, you can highlight the contraband in your area by holding down the B button on your controller. Still, it doesn’t take much for the cops to sneak up on you if you’re focused on the task at hand and aren’t paying attention.
It makes logical sense that you’d need to hide your crimes to avoid arousing suspicion. However, there’s an added layer of anxiety involved when you’re physically throwing your cash in drawers or jamming materials into cupboards up close. Prison Boss Prohibition does well to twist the meditative process of creating contraband from calming to calamitous, further immersing you in the criminal fantasy. And despite how involved the activities I’m completing are, I find myself popping my head out onto the street every few seconds to check for oncoming law enforcement.
There’s a lot of customization too, and your workshop composition is totally up to you. If the furniture doesn’t fit your flow, you can easily move it around by hovering over the item and holding the trigger as you point to a new space. As you earn more items to craft across the game’s three levels, your needs will naturally change, too, a process that encourages welcome experimentation. Where flatscreen games like Plate Up or Overcooked provide the same kind of efficiency-focused experience, the practical nature of Prison Boss Prohibition adds more tension to your choices. When rushing around, every centimeter of distance counts.
The processes involved here feel intended to be completed hastily and with as much chaotic momentum as possible. It’s unfortunate, then, that the tracking, at least on the Quest 3, isn’t quite smooth enough to make this experience feel completely immersive. When switching between my left and right hand while completing actions, or when grabbing at drawer handles on my cabinets, my chicken hands would stick or complete my actions on a slight delay. As such, it becomes incredibly frustrating to craft contraband or hide items as my movements became more frantic in the face of a police visit. In fear of losing all my loot over a lagging left hand, I’m forced to move with more intention at a much slower pace, a decision that seems at odds with the gameplay – this neutered some of the fun.
Prison Boss Prohibition is a great experience when playing solo; it’s just more enticing with a co-op partner in tow. Instead of one little building, you’ll have double the amount of space to build an empire together. Curiously, you can’t cross into the other player’s area, and an invisible wall separates you. Thankfully, items can be thrown across. This isn’t usually an issue, though it does feel like it keeps us at a distance, and I can’t help with hiding items when the police come knocking.
In tandem with the tracking issues, Prison Boss Prohibition became more of a casual social game than a mayhem-filled one. There’s no denying I thoroughly enjoyed bottling brews with my partner in crime. I just would have preferred the freedom to run to their station and frantically shove cash into drawers, or misplace their stash to cause issues like a chaos merchant, too.
Prison Boss Prohibition Review – Final Verdict
Prison Boss Prohibition carefully iterates on the processes of its predecessor and provides a hilarious opportunity to test your criminal prowess in VR. The world surrounding your illicit behavior is wonderfully silly and yet still creates a sense of urgency as you cook up all manner of contraband. While control issues hamper the immersion, Trebuchet’s poultry-filled co-op simulation provides an enticing gameplay loop well worth sinking an afternoon into – even if you are a clumsy suspect with poor planning skills like me.
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