10 Stupidly Awful Gaming Prisons Staffed By Total Idiots

Sometimes, it's boring to be powerful. While the majority of games are about empowerment, where only you can save the world through the powers of manly bullets and fists, liberally spraying enemy viscera up the walls can occasionally become grating. Sure, games are about empowerment, but there's also got to be an element of challenge and risk €“ two attributes that fall by the wayside when you're armed with weaponry that offend decency and taste. This is why so many games throw you in prison. To be disarmed and de-powered can offer a refreshing change of pace, pulling the rug from under your protagonist's feet and make you think of other strategies that don't involve grinding enemies into fine powder through an embarrassingly vast arsenal. But of course, while the prison level is a staple of game design, they can't be inescapable €“ a change of pace is one thing, but to spend two hours being told you're the chosen one before settling down to turning toothbrushes into shanks, earning enough money to buy fancy packs of breakfast cereal and dodging the amorous advances of soap-lathered men in the showers is no way to end a game. Escape is always needed, otherwise you're going to have a lot of people wondering why your dungeons and dragons epic suddenly turned into an episode of Oz. Yet while some prisons require a ridiculous, meticulously well-planned escape orchestrated by Gary Oldman and featuring naught but Gulag prisoners with very little sense of self-preservation, others are embarrassingly easy, featuring guards who go out of their way to screw things up, embarrassingly insecure cells and occasionally, just an outright failure of prison policy full-stop. So read on, and witness the most bizarrely insecure prisons ever put on a computer screen.