Prison Episodes in Video Games
- Case 2 of the second Ace Attorney Investigations. Notably the victim here was the killer in the first case, and the murderer from the very first case in the series appears as a witness.
- Connor finds himself in a depressing recreation of Bridewell Prison in Assassin's Creed III, after a violent altercation leads to a cross-city pursuit that gets him arrested and framed.
- On the route to the Golden Ending of Aviary Attorney, the protagonists tell the king that they'll defend him in court and the king, offended at the implication that he isn't a Universally Beloved Leader, throws them in jail. An allied prosecutor lets them out and says the charges are dropped.
- In Bravely Default the party is knocked unconscious trying to pass through the enemy stronghold and are thrown in prison, except for Edea, who very easily takes the cell keys and breaks into the prison to break the rest of the party out. Amusingly, when she enters the prison, a party chat can be viewed where the rest of the party comes to the conclusion that Edea is suffering a far worse fate than them and are planning a wacky escape scheme, only for Edea to come in and point out how loud they were yelling their plans (they're held in separate cells and were unsure of how far they were from each other.). It's even funnier when the random encounters reveal there most definitely ARE a lot of guards patrolling the cells.
- Chrono Trigger has one sequence in a prison cell. However, it follows a very humorous scene and precedes a challenging boss, so it's better than most. It is especially interesting because the prison lets you keep your sword.
- There are two prison sequences in Chrono Trigger. The second one strips the party of equipment, inventory, and cash after the party is distracted by a Look Behind You. Ensues a Stealth-Based Mission unless Ayla is in the current party.
- Command & Conquer: Renegade has you captured and stripped of your weapons.
- In Daughter for Dessert, the protagonist spends a few days in jail after breaking into Cecilia’s hotel room.
- Dead to Rights has an extremely long prison level early in the game, where the player has to compete in various minigames and do a lot of hand-to-hand combat to arrange a prison break.
- Deus Ex features one of these after you send a warning signal to the NSF and antagonize UNATCO. Getting out of the cell is easy, while escaping the whole prison complex can be nigh-impossible depending on the character build.
- Discworld Noir has a brief prison-escape scene at the Patrician's Palace, which takes Lewton into Leonard of Quirm's secret workshop. A subversion because, once he's broken out of his cell, Lewton has to repeatedly break back into the secret location he'd escaped through to close the case.
- Divinity: Original Sin II opens with the party being trapped in a concentration camp for Sourcerers, with the first act devoted to finding a way to remove their Power Limiter collars and escape. There's also the main quest "Shadow Over Driftwood", where the party is captured by the mad Sourcerer Mordus following a Hopeless Boss Fight with his Voidwoken minions who web them up and drop them into different cells. However, it's possible to bypass this part of the quest entirely by abusing the Teleport spell and Teleporter Pyramids.
- Dragon Age: Origins has an optional main quest called "Captured!", which sees your player character thrown into prison after either being defeated or turning themselves (and possibly their fellow Grey Warden) in; you can either break out alone (or with said companion) or select two of your party members to break in and rescue you. The latter option is probably the single biggest source of hilarity in an otherwise grimdark game.
- Dragon Age: Inquisition begins with a prison episode, as the player character is shackled and guarded by several soldiers with drawn swords, and they have no idea what's happened. Unlike most instances, however, they neither break out nor get rescued; rather, they accompany their captors to deal with the situation at hand.
- The Elder Scrolls
- Each game in the main series (except for Daggerfall) starts the Player Character off as a prisoner. Escaping or being released is usually part of the tutorial, before the game Opens The Sandbox.
- If you commit a crime and then speak to a guard, you have the options of paying a fine, going to jail, or resisting arrest. Choosing to go to jail, depending on the game, either has an amount of time pass based on the size of your bounty or literally puts you in a jail cell with the options to try to escape or sleep in the bed to serve your sentence. In each case save for escape, one of your skills will randomly decrease as part of the punishment. (Simulating not using it due to being in jail.)
- Morrowind has a mission during the main quest to break into the Ministry of Truth, the Tribunal Temple's maximum security prison for blasphemers and heretics, in order to rescue a friend who is imprisoned there. The prison is built into a hollowed-out moonlet which hovers over Vivec City, requiring levitation to reach. There, you must sneak past or fight through scores of the Temple's elite Ordinators to bring your friend the teleportation scroll needed to escape.
- Skyrim: When you first enter Markarth you get to witness an innocent woman (potentially - you can stop it if you're quick) being murdered in the middle of a crowded city square. If you work with a local miner to investigate, the corrupt guards eventually pin the murder on you and throw you in prison. You're stuck in there until you find a way to escape.
- The 1982 Escape From Rungistan game starts with "escape from a jail cell". You had to (a) ask a guard to bring you dinner (b) give a piece of cheese to a mouse (c) move your bed under a window (d) give a piece of candy to a child and (e) dig a hole in a wall to get out.
- In Fable, the Hero is captured and sent to Jack's dungeon for at least a year. Part of escaping involves winning a race against the other inmates and being "rewarded" with a private recitation of the warden's poetry.
- The Spire in Fable II, but this time, you're actually hired as one of the guards, and you have to help break out one of the prisoners in a period lasting about ten years.
- There are several examples of this is the Final Fantasy series.
- In Final Fantasy VIII: You have to escape a prison in the middle of a desert.
- Ditto Final Fantasy IX.
- In Final Fantasy VII, the desert is the prison.
- There's another in Final Fantasy X, surprisingly not in a desert.
- The characters of Final Fantasy XII have to survive the Nalbina Dungeons, which is full of people who are just left there to die of thirst or starvation. The Dreadnought Leviathan can also be considered a prison episode. After the Tomb of Raithwall the characters are arrested a third time but they escape quickly thanks to the nethicite blowing up the Ifrit
- Grand Theft Auto 2 has a level where you specifically have to get arrested and then spend time in prison before escaping again.
- Illusion of Gaia throws Will into the castle dungeon near the beginning of the game.
- In Kingdom Hearts II, the first (and unplanned) visit to Space Paranoids revolves around the party being in a digital prison following an accident involving a mysterious blue alien. With the help of a friendly program named Tron, they manage to escape their cell, and subsequently escape the computer that's imprisoned them.
- Used a number of times in The Legend of Zelda, and there are some cases where The Guards Must Be Crazy since if Link is caught and imprisoned, they don't bother to take away his weapons:
- In the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the Gerudo Thieves throw Link into some sort of cell, leaving him all of his equipment, and no matter how many times he escapes and gets caught again, they just throw him back in the same cell. With all of his equipment. It applies to both the patrolling guards and the ones he has to fight to free the imprisoned carpenters, who can perform a special spin attack that delivers an instant KO, which lands him in the prison, and after he escapes, he has to fight that same guard all over again until he is successful.
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past begins with a prison sequence, but makes you break in to save the princess.
- The prison in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess makes sense, but the one in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is absolutely a Cardboard Prison. The way out of the cell is hidden behind a pot (though it would still work wonders at imprisoning moblins...or any adult male, for that matter).
- Kaim and company in Lost Odyssey are at one point obliged to escape from the brig of a royal yacht, dodging security drones and pussy-footing across pressure-sensitive floor tiles. Hilariously, they begin their escape by wiping the memory of their guard and convincing him that they were jailed by accident, so even if the player makes a mistake and the party gets caught again, the guard will apologize and let them back out.
- Chapter six of Mafia II, "Time well Spent," follows Vitto as he serves time inside Hartmann Federal Penitentiary.
- In Max Payne, Max is drugged, tied up, whacked with a baseball bat, and still manages to get out and continue his Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- In Metal Gear, Snake is thrown in a jail cell... from which the player can escape in seconds simply by punching the wall. The prison escape sequences of Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, however, were fun and memorable.
- In Planet Alcatraz, although the whole planet is technically is a prison, the Industrial Area is the only place that most resembles a prison, or more precisely, a labor camp. You're stripped of all belongings and have to run errands for the bosses to get promoted, before having the opportunity to escape. One of the Nonstandard Game Over screens implies you spend the rest of your life there working.
- In Penny Arcade's parody RPG, On The Rain Slick Precipice Of Darkness Episode 2 the main characters are at one point placed in a sanitarium. While your two companions are locked up, tied down or what-have-you, your character is allowed to run completely free, albeit disarmed. On the other hand, when you rescue your friends, they haven't been disarmed.
- The last level of the 2005 Punisher game features Frank Castle in Ryker's Island during a prison riot led by Jigsaw. He starts out unarmed, but quickly gets guns from the mooks.
- In Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire, the titular hero gets his behind tossed in the prison of Raseir. This is the first time in the game where it's not an instant death and involves breaking out, but this was all a plan by the game's villain, who then proceeds to show up after your break, and have his evil ways with you.
- And again in Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness where the now-undead evil vizier Ad Avis from Trial by Fire traps you in his dungeon. Yet again part of a bigger plan, seeing as he hopes you figure out how to break out and kill the Master of Darkness. Too bad the Master of Darkness is someone you know and by hammering a stake trough the vampire's chest, you earn a Game over! Ad Avis... will you never learn.
- Randal's Monday: After Randal is wrongly accused of Matt's murder.
- At one point in Resistance 3, you are captured by bandits who use a local prison as their base. They force you to fight in a gladiatorial arena, until one of their own has a change of heart and frees you, giving you The Mutator, a gun that essentially makes enemies puke themselves to death. Brutal revenge ensues.
- Saints Row 2: The game begins in a prison; your character has to bust out after awakening from a 5-year coma after the events of the previous game. They have to break in (and back out again) later, when a drugs specialist is required.
- In Shadowman the main character is tasked with tracking down and killing five serial killers and take away the dark souls that empower them. Three of them are in the same prison, and have started a riot. Because the lockdown prevents the player character from exploring the whole prison, he must use portals in Deadside to access different parts of the prison.
- Silent Hill 2 has a level exploring a prison beneath the lake of the town.
- The main character of Silent Hill: Downpour is a convict who escaped after his prison transfer bus crashed in the town. The last level of the game has the town transporting him to a prison where he must finally confront his past.
- Sonic Adventure 2 sees Sonic taken to Prison Island after being mistaken for Shadow. A handful of stages take place on the island, some within the prison complex itself.
- In Space Rangers 2 engaging in criminal activity may result in the character being sentenced to several months in jail. This triggers one of the game's many text-based minigames. Throughout his stay the character can join a fight club, race cockroaches, become a stool pigeon for the guards and, if he plays his cards right, come out much richer than he was going in. Granted, he may also die, but that's a minor detail.
- In Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Sam goes undercover as a prisoner to infiltrate a domestic terror organization and earn their trust.
- Tales of Symphonia has Lloyd, the main character, tossed into a Desian prison in the middle of the desert. He busts out on his own, just before the party shows up... too late.
- In Temtem, the Player Character is arrested upon entering the Underground City of Quetzal as the result of a Frame-Up, losing their Mons and gear. You escape with the aid of your airship crewmates and have to fight your way through the mines surrounding the prison with a donated party.
- The last segment of Tex Murphy: Overseer takes place on the island prison of Alkatraz. Tex Murphy finds himself trapped a cell and must escape and make his way deep into the prison while avoiding deadly security droids.
- Tomb Raider III puts Lara in this.
- Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne has a campaign mission where Lady Vashj and Kael'thas free the Blood Elves from the Dalaran dungeons, which are full of ultra horrifying monsters. It isn't a bad level, but at the end of the day it isn't as challenging as the normal base-building campaign missions.
- World of Warcraft has the Stockades, an instanced prison dungeon in the center of Stormwind serving prior to the Cataclysm as a continuation of the Defias questline and now updated to fit current miscreants.
- At one point in Watch_Dogs, Aiden sneaks into a prison (by turning himself in, gun in hand) in order to frighten/save a witness.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Near the end of Chapter 5, the gang infiltrates a prison in order to rescue Ghondor. They purposefully end up getting captured themselves until their escape plan is ready to be put into action. In the meantime, the gang are tasked with mundane chores such as collecting items and slaying monsters (remember, this is a fantasy world), serving as a Breather Episode until their escape. When they gang are finally about to escape the prison, they end up encountering M and N.
- XIII features one (two?) levels inside Plain Rock Asylum, a mental institution.
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule GB, Seto Kaiba's RPG World starts with Yugi's imprisonment.
