Cell Block: Prison Story

You are inside for thirty days. Four blocks a day - yard, work detail, association, and the last hour before the landing goes dark. One choice in each. That is the whole game, and there is no clock anywhere in it.

NOTHING RESETS

Most short games hand you a clean board every time you open them. This one does not. A favour you did on day four is still owed to you on day thirty, by name. A debt you took to get through a bad week is still there, getting older, until you pay it or somebody comes to collect it. The ledger is the game.

Prison life here is paperwork, tea and other people. Eight of them share the landing with you. Prentice runs the urn. Ogilvy has been here longest and remembers everything. Mackey owes half the wing. They remember what you did, both ways, and none of it fades.

A SHORT DAILY GAME

A day takes two or three minutes to read. Then the block goes dark one cell at a time, from the far end of the landing toward yours, and the day's ledger writes itself on the wall in the dark. That is the end of the session. Come back tomorrow.

No timers. No energy bars. Nothing ticking down while the app is closed, and nothing that plays itself while you are not looking.

CHOICE AND CONSEQUENCE

Every choice tells you what it costs before you take it. None of them tells you what it risks. What comes of it arrives days later with somebody's name attached, which is the only kind of consequence worth having.

Serve your sentence and walk out of the gate. That is the win. Nobody gets tough, nobody gets feared, and the paperwork carries on regardless.

THE PAPERWORK IS THE JOKE

The tannoy announces the laundry rota, then announces it again. The noticeboard still carries a fire drill notice from 2011 and a suggestion box that has received exactly one suggestion. The library is closed; see the library for details.

WHAT IS IN IT

- A thirty-day prison sentence, four blocks a day, one decision a day that matters

- Forty written choices that open and close as your name on the landing changes

- Favours and debts held by name, carried across the whole run, alongside the grudges of anyone you let down

- Eight people whose opinion of you moves both ways and never resets

- A reputation game where the reputation is a name on a landing, not a number

- A commissary, because a card with nothing on it is its own kind of problem

- Five things nobody will tell you about

- Full English and Korean, both written rather than machine-translated

- Plays offline, start to finish

A reading game, and a text game in the old sense. Interactive fiction with a spreadsheet underneath it, if you want the honest description. If you liked branching story games but wanted one that remembers, this is that.

CONTAINS ADS, NO IN-APP PURCHASES

There is one advert, between days, and it shows every third day. Three optional rewarded videos are offered and never forced: cut a spell in segregation short, put an extra credit on your card, or call in a favour when the board has nothing on it you can afford.

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