Prison Boss Prohibition is a business simulator with a hectic energy only selling contraband and avoiding the law can give.
Add a lighthearted tone to a serious subject, and you have a whole new taste for it. Hazbin Hotel introduces a starry-eyed main character to save condemned souls in Hell. Forrest Gump’s premise of an autistic man who apparently was behind every major pivotal moment in the 20th century. Prison Boss Prohibition puts you in a pun-filled backdrop when the sale of alcoholic beverages was prohibited with a twist. Living in New Yolk City, every character is either a chicken or an egg, and as an aspiring peddler of contraband, your goal is to make your way to the top while avoiding the coppers. I mean, police.
Every day begins with a supplier offering plenty of ingredients from their catalogue for you to craft. What, did you think they were just going to give you the tobacco outright? Once the purchase has been completed, by satisfactorily pulling your cash register’s handle, the items will drop off on your counter. Prison Boss Prohibition is very messy. That is something that you learn early on. After reading the New Yolk Times about the fluctuating prices of the day, it is time to make moolah by pulling the clock in a period of either 9, 12, or, for the hardcore criminals, 30 days. Its helpful tutorial commits to letting you learn the ropes before letting you off the rails.
A multiplayer-centric VR game lives and dies by two pillars: how fun it is and how well it works. Suffice to say, Prison Boss Prohibition accomplishes both with flying colors. The fun here is not only crafting items to sell to demanding customers but also always being aware of the police that might walk down the road and confiscate everything that is in sight. In your small, unassuming store, you must frantically hide everything in your well-placed cabinets and drawers to not end up losing both merchandise and hard cash. Doing this as the jazzy soundtrack crescendoes is incredibly chaotic in a way few 4-player co-op games of its kind are.
There are plenty of virtual reality games that end up disappointing their players because they do not register when you do a physical action. After all, it becomes exhausting to try to pull back a bow only for the game to not do as you intended it to. Not in Prison Boss Prohibition’s case. In the myriad mechanics that you need to physically engage in to sustain your bootlegging empire, crafting every shady product is most satisfying. One of the first items, for instance, is a soda that you need to make by grabbing the bottle, opening a water faucet and filling it up, adding flavoring, and shaking it. Each move described feels perfectly attuned to what you are asked to do, never feeling cheap or imprecise. And that goes double for the DLC that adds a furnace.
The sequel to a 2017 game called Prison Boss VR, developer Trebuchet now has found enough success to even deliver an expansive DLC called Grind & Shine for Prison Boss Prohibition. Including a fifth map with new contraband to craft and a new gang to complete special orders for, the flexibility in its systems keeps things snappy. As mentioned, hammering iron ores and ingots to create new items and artifacts on the forge makes things even more interactive. Increasingly outrageous paid and free cosmetics to show off with friends round out the consistent package.
A great gameplay loop that keeps you coming back is hard to achieve, especially with so many of them demanding our attention. What Prison Boss Prohibition accomplishes is not only a frantic everyday management of a bootlegging business but also a playful recreation of a criminal enterprise. The more friends join the session, the more exciting it is, and with almost 500 reviews on the Meta Horizon app, it is easy to call it a game that has found its contraband-loving audience.
Prison Boss Prohibition is out now for Meta Quest and Steam.
