Tailor Made Prison / Video Games

Tailor-Made Prisons in Video Games.

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• In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, the Caladonian authorities have a special jail cell that was custom-built by one of Arcanum's finest engineers to imprison J. T. Morgan, the world's greatest lock-picker.
• The Expansion Pack to Baldur's Gate II, Throne of Bhaal, adds one of these in the form of Watcher's Keep. It's a huge, elaborate prison, full of traps, puzzles, and even dips a little into alternate planes of existence. All to keep its prisoner safely under lock and key for all eternity. Said prisoner is none other than Demogorgan, Prince of Demons.
• Killer Croc in Batman: Arkham Asylum is kept in the deepest, darkest depths of Arkham, where the guards occasionally drop down some food for him and try to forget he even exists. This is because physically, Croc is the most dangerous inmate, and his feeding habits make him even worse.
  • Even the standard cells in the place are tiny, barely large enough to lie straight, and the inmates seem to spend long times locked in them with no means of recreation, judging from the ways some walls have been 'decorated'.
  • Mr. Freeze similarly has a unique prison cell, but in his case it is to keep him alive without his suit and its assorted powers.
  • Clayface's cell is completely hermetically sealed, impossible for one person to open and has warning signs explaining that the occupant is a shapeshifter and will try to impersonate someone else to trick passersby into letting him go.
• BioShock 2's Persephone prison has solitary confinement cells and the prison itself is suspended over a deep underwater trench.
• Relius Clover from BlazBlue has a variation of this in his Astral Finish, where he captures the oponent and teleports them somewhere in his lab, where they'll be restrained just before the door closes so he can begin his "experiments" on them. Each character gets a different pose that serves either to nulify their abilities (Werewolf Valkenhayn gets tied and muzzled so he can't transform, Noel, Mu, Nu and Lambda get locked inside Murakumo Units Tubes, Tager gets immobilized by magnets) or simply trap them with a touch of Death by Irony.
• The Borderlands games have the Vault, designed to hold the Destroyer in 1 and the Warrior in 2. There's also the custom Eridium device used on Angel.
• The MMO Champions Online features a couple of these, for sealing demons or villains with mental powers. The best example comes in the Adventure Pack "Resistance", in which you travel to a Mirror World, and your main mission is to break two members of that world's resistance out of a couple of these prisons. In one of the prisons (Stronghold) this has backfired, with the most powerful psychic villain in the world having broken free of his restraints and taken over the prison from the inside using other prisoners and villains.
• The Allied victory in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge has Yuri Prime being captured, escorted by mind-shielded guards, and put in a special capsule where he would be unable to use his powers. It's literally like a hyper-advanced coffin, with dentist equipment near his head.
  General Carville: He won't be able to mind-control a fly.
• In Criminal Case: The Conspiracy, Cathy installs an electromagnetic scrambling device in Mayor Joe Warren's cell to prevent him from using his telekinetic powers during his interrogation/arrest.
• Deltarune:
  • In Chapter 1, after you escape Card Castle's dungeon, you can go to a question marked floor where a Creepy Circus Music is playing the deepest you go. In the isolated cell is locked Jevil, a character so powerful he had to be locked alone in a cell which looks lie a carousel in the deepest floor, the cell key had to be cut in three, and the three pieces had to be hidden in different locations of the Card Kingdom. Jevil is actually happy of his fate because, in his own words, the kings built a prison around the whole world, leaving him the only free one. Considering the nature of the game, he's not so far from reality.
  • In Chapter 2, Queen captures the Delta Warriors and Noelle and puts them in holding cells that incorporate their search history, since she's the personification of the Library's main computer. Fortunately, thanks to Lancer popping out of Kris' "pants hole" and ordering a thousand shovels for the room, Kris is able to escape and free the rest of the gang.
• Baal of the Diablo universe was imprisoned in a soulstone along with his two brothers. His, however, cracked and in order to contain him it was driven into the mind of the mage Tal Rasha, who would engage in an eternal battle with the Prime Evil. On top of that, Tal Rasha was chained both literally and magically inside a very tightly sealed tomb, among several, several other identical on the outside tombs in the middle of a killer desert. It didn't end well. On the other hand, it was apparently the only prison of the three that wasn't subverted from within by the Prime Evils — sucks to be Tal Rasha, but it did keep Baal trapped until Diablo showed up to break him out.
• In Dragon Age II, the Grey Wardens constructed a fortress in the Vinmark Mountains that serves as a prison for numerous demons, but mostly to hold Corypheus, one of the first darkspawn. Notably, the magical seals on the prison must be occasionally renewed with Blood Magic from an untainted Mage, requiring them to use apostates outside of the Circle. Malcolm Hawke is revealed to have been the last mage to do so, having been forcibly coerced by the Warden unless he wanted anything bad to happen to Leandra, who was pregnant with Hawke at the time. The Legacy DLC revolves around Hawke (and possibly their sibling) travelling to the prison to find out why the Carta are so determined to use their blood to break the seals and get into that prison.
• Dragon Quest IX has one of these for Corvus. Guess what you're forced to do?
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The Great Porch of Dragonsreach was built specifically to imprison a dragon captured by Olaf One-Eye back in the first era. This becomes important when Alduin goes into hiding and you need to interrogate one of his minions — a dragon — to find him.
• In Final Fantasy V, the Interdimensional Rift acts as one; a prison for the worst demons in history, with its entrance sealed away in a space between dimensions. For example, when speaking of Omega and Shinryu, the game says that "Inside the Rift the demons were interred; so should they stay until forever's end, their names to stay unspoken evermore." Unfortunately, it turns out that the Rift is home to the power of the Void (or it may be the same thing, the game is unclear), which means that it was necessary to seal the prison itself, because it had become a weapon.
• Adel, the tyrant sorceress and former ruler of Esthar in Final Fantasy VIII, is imprisoned in a stasis capsule suspended in orbit above the planet, and her powers are suppressed by an Anti-Magic field so powerful that radio communication on the planet's surface is next to impossible.
• Final Fantasy XII: The Esper Ultima is sealed in Giruvegan's Great Crystal, behind a maze of force fields and teleporters, for leading the Espers' rebellion against the Occuria.
• Furi is a game all about this trope. The main character, The Stranger, is attempting to break out of his custom super-prison made of nine islands floating in orbit above the planet below. Each island was custom-built for the Guardian that lives there, each of them one of the planet's mightiest warriors, forcing the Stranger to fight on terrain best suited for each of his enemies. And he has to fight them; the only way onto the next island is a portal that only activates upon its Guardian's death. The "tailor-made" aspect of the trope becomes very poignant when the end of the game revealed that The Stranger is a Walking Wasteland who could render miles of land desolate simply by going for a run. It becomes even more poignant as well as undermined when you find out that the Stranger was just one of dozens, if not hundreds of mass-produced clone soldiers called Riders; there's no telling how long it would be before the mothership decided to simply deploy another one to assimilate the planet.
• Half-Life: Alyx: The gigantic floating Vault you see above you throughout most of the game is eventually known to be a prison of this sort. The sheer amount of measures taken, from merely advanced machinery for confinement, backup shield and antigravity generators in case of attack and failure of the ground-based facilities to enslaved Vortigaunts (which the Combine cannot control and usually exterminate due to being part of the rebellion) who need to be restrained and wired up just to siphon their Vortessence to power whatever utterly unconventional mechanisms the prison needs to function, indicate that whatever is inside is something the Combine are bowel-voidingly terrified of. The Rebellion is convinced it's Gordon Freeman... It actually turns out to be the G-Man, who takes his imprisonment as nonchalantly as a man waiting for a doctor's appointment and thus leaves one wondering if even all that was enough.
• Hollow Knight:
  • The Black Egg Temple was made specifically to house the Hollow Knight. The door was hermetically sealed by the Dreamers, and your entire journey through the game takes place in order to find a way to open it. After opening the door, you find a large room filled with massive Seals of Binding, all enveloping the Hollow Knight's prison. The prison itself is a relatively small room, filled with chains, all keeping the Hollow Knight bound and suspended above the ground. The Hollow Knight's armor even has big metal loops on the shoulders for the chains to go through.
  • In essence, both the player character and the Hollow Knight are prisons to contain the Radiance. The Pale King created all of the Vessels specifically to house the Radiance, since her corruption of people's minds and wills wouldn't have an effect on a creature that lacked both. Out of the thousands of Vessels created, the Hollow Knight was the only one deemed "empty" enough to house the Radiance. This turned out to be a mistake, as the Hollow Knight did end up having a will and was taken over by the Radiance, becoming a Leaking Can of Evil.
• As might be expected based on the source material, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream heavily features this trope. AM keeps its five human prisoners trapped in specially-made cells that reinforce their own personal hells (Ellen, for example, is sealed inside an elevator car that's painted yellow, reflecting her being raped by a man dressed in yellow inside an elevator). Later, AM expands the cells into full-on virtual reality simulations of the group's worst nightmares; players are tasked with choosing the right actions to overcome AM's traps and beat the insane computer at his own game.
• At the end of the story mode of Injustice: Gods Among Us, Injustice Superman is brought to the normal DC universe where they lock him up in a cell illuminated with lamps that simulate a red sun, nullifying his powers.
• Metroid:
  • Gorea from Metroid Prime: Hunters had an interdimensional prison to lock him away and keep him from demolishing the Alimbic Cluster. His means of egress are a forged psychic message and the eight Octoliths that power the device necessary to open it again... too bad the person responsible for opening the door just happened to be Samus.
  • The eponymous creature in Metroid Prime was trapped in the impact crater by a forcefield erected by the Chozo. In the American localization of the game, Space Pirates accidentally free it by digging under the forcefield and take it to be studied, although it escapes and returns to its lair. This was retconned in the European localization and the English version of Metroid Prime Trilogy where it never got out. Samus has to collect the artifacts needed to open a passage into the crater and kill it.
• The Big Bad of Mother 3, Porky Minch, has lived for thousands of years, and is both immortal and immobile. By his request, Dr. Andonuts created an Absolutely Safe Capsule for him, to keep himself safe after his mecha breaks down. The catch is, being absolutely safe, there's no way out of the capsule, making it the only way to remove him from the fight permanently.
• Frequently appears in the Myst series. Linking Books can transport you to whatever sort of world is described on their pages, but if there's no Linking Book leading back you're trapped for good.
  • The so-called Trap Books featured prominently in the game also might count. They work like Linking Books; however, due to a slight alteration, they link to a Void Between the Worlds where a person can end up trapped forever, unable to move or interact with anything, their only view of the outside world being the panel they touched, and only if the book is open. A Trap Book only holds one, however, and if another person touches the panel while the book is occupied, the two switch places.
  • After the retcon in Myst IV: Revelation, the Trap Books seen in Myst and Riven are explained to simply link to Prison Ages — worlds where, as described above, there are no Linking Books leading back.
  • In Riven, Catherine is imprisoned in a tower on the former Great Tree island, which has drifted out of sight of the other islands and is only accessible via the linking book from Gehn's 233rd Age, after cracking the access codes and imprisoning Gehn in one of the aforementioned trap books.
  • In Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, the set of fortresses in the Gahreesan age rotate, specifically so that there's no place to link in safely except the very center. In the second (and larger) fortress, a number of usually inescapable prison chambers are found above, usually with some bones in them. The implication is that prisoners were linked to precisely one point, but the rotation of the cells meant that they could store quite a few bodies up there with the right timing.
• In Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, you and your party find Gannayev in a small, windowless prison cell covered from floor to ceiling in magical runes. The reason for this is because has the ability to travel through people's dreams and, while he can't use this ability to escape, he can use it to get hot dream-sex when he should be being punished.
• A secret teleporter in Pathways into Darkness traps you in one.
• Persona 5 inverts this, as the Velvet Room, an Eldritch Location which changes into a locale tailor-made for its current guest, becomes a prison for P5's Protagonist.
• Being based on Planescape, the Mazes naturally featured in Planescape: Torment. A major part of the game is finding your way into the Maze of Ravel Puzzlewell (who had found the exit long ago, but either no longer wants to have anything to do with the wider planes or is too muddled in the head to be able to comprehend leaving). You can also get trapped in your own Maze and attempt to find your way out. This is considered a Bonus Level of Hell for several reasons.
  • Furthermore, Ravel implies that Sigil is the tailor-made prison of the Lady of Pain. The reason Ravel invaded the city with an army of devils was apparently an attempt to free her.
• You can build one in your house in RuneScape, and drop people in through a trapdoor in the throne room. Unfortunately, you build a door in the cage holding the prisoner, so they can escape, usually. The oubliette's floor can be covered with spikes, a murky pool with tentacles, fire, or a weak monster.
• SaGa Frontier: An entire world is turned into a massive prison, originally built to house one single prisoner: the prison's own warden.
• CR-S01, the amnesiac general surgeon from Trauma Team who's serving a 250-year prison sentence for allegedly orchestrating a bioterrorism attack on a college eight years prior to the start of the game, is kept in a refrigerated cell that's maintained at zero degrees Celsius in order to inhibit the growth of weaponized bacteria. Interestingly (and for obvious logistical reasons), when he's being held at Resurgam First Care while working there, nothing is done to the temperature of the room he's staying in (though he's still under heavy guard).
• ULTRAKILL: Both Prime Souls introduced thus far were contained by the angels in inescapable flesh constructs made of divine power and hell energy in order to be punished for their crimes, but also out of fear that they would become too powerful if they were allowed to roam free.
  • Minos Prime lies captive in the Flesh Prison, which can restore itself if damaged and defend itself against intruders. It does a pretty good job of keeping its prisoner contained (until V1 manages to kill it, that is). While he thanks V1 for setting him free, he still decides that the machines cannot be forgiven for their own crimes against humanity, and so he sentences V1 to death.
    Minos Prime: Ahh... Free at last.
  • Sisyphus Prime, on the other hand, lies imprisoned in the Flesh Panopticon, allegedly a superior version of the Flesh Prison. Superior or not, it only barely manages to contain its immensely powerful prisoner, who escapes on his own once you sufficiently damage the Flesh Panopticon. Unlike Minos Prime, Sisyphus challenges V1 both "as an appetizer" for his planned rampage against Heaven and out of a desire to test his own strength against V1's.
    Sisyphus Prime: This prison... To hold ME?

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