Inmates can escape over walls using ropes made of uniforms in latest Prison Architect update

Managing your own jail in Prison Architect just got a little bit tougher. As of the latest update, prisoners can now attempt to escape using a rope fashioned from their own jumpsuits.

Prisoners working in the laundry will occasionally try to steal five uniforms to make the rope, and may trade it with other prisoners. If you don't notice the missing stock or find the rope stashed away, then they'll head out to the nearest wall, fling the rope over, and make their escape. You'll have to tell a workman to get it down sharpish, because other prisoners can follow them.

Strong prisoners now don't even need a rope to escape: then can straight-up climb over fences to get out.

But you've also got a new tool to help keep prisoners in line: the roll call. You can do it at anytime—3am seems best—and it will wake up all prisoners and force them to stand in their cell doorway. If they're late, it's a dead giveaway that they've been tunneling underground, and nearby guards (or your own watchful eyes) will notice.

The update also adds new graphs for your to track the performance of your prison over time, improves mod support and fixes bugs. You can read the patch notes here, and watch developer Introversion Software talk through the changes in the video above.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.