Catharsis Factor: Whether it's beating them into submission, crippling them for life, or killing them outright, it's immensely satisfying to get back at people who've been giving you a hard time during your stay in prison.
Demonic Spiders: Any cellmate that isn't a member of The Peaks constitutes a significant existential threat even if they are not openly hostile to you. Because sleeping while your Health is full drains your Happiness plus that other inmates do not understand this and will jump at the chance to sleep with full Health during lockup, the odds that even a friendly cellmate will have a breakdown and start swinging at you is extremely high. The only way to prevent this short of adjusting the situation so that you no longer have a cellmate or hiding out in the showers every lockup (which is not ideal since beds are the fastest way to pass time) is to hog the bed yourself, but if your Health is full then you're putting yourself at risk of being the one having the breakdown. What makes matters worse is that because the cause of this is sleeping with full Health, that all but guarantees that you'll be dealing with an attacker who won't go down easily with nowhere to run if the door has been closed. The reason that having a cellmate who's with The Peaks is an exception is because they will never attack even while having a breakdown, which means that they're merely an annoyance. That said while hogging the bed as a member of The Peaks will prevent you from attacking your cellmate should you go berserk, it still runs the risk of them going berserk while you're berserk and leading to a situation where you can't defend yourself.
Memetic Mutation: Thanks to Vinesauce Joel's streams of the game in 2015, jokes revolving around his "Bulk Bogan" character tend to be pretty heavily tied to Hard Time itself.
Narm: This game was meant to be a prison simulator. You're in a prison alright, but one that doesn't resemble any prison in reality.
The court judge can let you off the hook for holding something like a guard's machine gun because "you didn't intend to use it as a weapon."
The game doesn't keep track of any NPC's actions. You could have an inmate pay you to take the heat for him, only for the same inmate to then offer to take the same heat himself for less than what he paid you earlier.
Recurring Fanon Character: As the game has a character creator, it seems inevitable that some of the creations would become popular. The most famous is Bulk Bogan, a knock-off version of Hulk Hogan created by Joel from Vinesauce.
It sucks to get sick: your movement speed is crippled, your health drains at a faster rate than usual, and the only way to get better is to sleep it off. It doesn't matter if you go to your cell or the clinic: it's an agonizingly slow walk either way, and getting targeted by the psychotically violent inmates and wardens or getting caught in the middle of a terrorist attack is pretty much a guaranteed death sentence in this state.
And then there are the terrorist attacks. They're announced pre-emptively via PA or phonecall, likely to give you time to prepare for them, but they're not really something you can prepare for seeing as how they're a series of wide-reaching, completely randomized explosions that deal a huge amount of damage. You basically have to just hope that the RNG is feeling merciful enough to keep you out of harms way when one inevitably happens. Although... It seems like the explosions are not capable of hitting the upper floors of the Cell Blocks, so perhaps when the game says to find a safe place to ride it out it's referring to that rather than just spewing flavor text.
Managing Happiness is also a massive chore to stay on top of. The most reliable ways to raise it are by watching TV in the Main Hall and mixing chemicals if you have 80% Intelligence or higher (as the gains from getting paid will easily offset the drain from working), but the main problems with handling it are that terrorist attacks and getting sick will take a big percentage based chunk out of your bar (leaving it in shambles if it was full) and sleeping while your Health is already full will drain your Happiness instead of raise it. Joining The Peaks will at least prevent you from starting trouble if your Happiness does zero out as members of that gang cannot attack other inmates while going berserk with this applying to the player as well, but it opens the risk of getting randomly arrested for being a member of a gang and having the Judge rule for the Warden, which will get you kicked out of the gang by the Judge (as little sense that makes) and leave you right back where you started.
So Bad, It's Good: Much like most of Mat Dickie's other works, it's a bizarre and shoddily coded game that still manages to be entertaining thanks to the absurdity of the NPC's behavior, as well the fact that suplexing and beating people down feels great.
That One Level: If you're playing as a character who starts with low intelligence, raising it in the library can be a real chore. Thanks to being small and cramped, it's easy to get caught in the crossfire when unrelated fights break out, and for whatever reason inmates are very bad about harassing and attacking you in this specific room. Even if you manage to slip in without any inmates present, you're still at the mercy of wardens who will force you to put down the books and cater to their whims on threat of slapping more days onto your sentence.
