Prison Break: The Conspiracy

There's a good chance that you didn't even know there was a Prison Break game. If you've heard of it, odds are that you've heard nothing good. The reviews have been largely brutal, and not unjustly. Prison Break: The Conspiracy is a deeply flawed game. However, it's also a soft target. It's a licensed game from a small publisher based on a defunct TV show. Sometimes it can be fun to pick on a game that you think no one will defend it. Well, I'll stand up for it. Yes, Prison Break: The Conspiracy isn't a great game, but nor is it as bad as some have made it out to be.

Prison Break: The Conspiracy

Publisher: Deep Silver / Developer: ZootFly / ESRB: M / $39.99

Prison Break: The Conspiracy follows a parallel story to the first season of the show. Like Lost: Via Domus, it places you in the role of a new character who interacts with the major characters and events from the show from a new perspective. It also shares with the Lost game the same narrative problem: The game can't be critical to the fiction, so non-gamer fans of the show don't miss a key piece of the story, nor can it be unfaithful to the source material. The result is a story that is largely inconsequential, a Cliff's Notes version of season one. I will say this about the game's plot: I had only a baseline knowledge of the show when I started the game, and the story kept me engaged enough that I now plan on watching it, and I don't feel like any major twists were ruined for me.