You find yourself wandering in a dark and uninhabited world of brick and stone. The only sounds are your weary footsteps echoing in the stale air of endless hallways and immense abandoned chambers. Each day’s beginning is a clawing in your empty stomach. Each day’s end is marked by a collapse into the nearest dust filled niche. You have lost all track of time, and the meaning of your wandering has begun to fade. You have vague recollections of persecution and depression and unbearable loss, but all thoughts have begun to seem dreamlike. Only the idea of escape is strong, renewing itself at the turn of every corner, the opening of every door, only to be denied with another cavernous room or stale passageway. Stairs lead to nowhere, tunnels turn back upon themselves. Where are the inhabitants? It seems like a week since you ate your last morsel of food, and the water just ran out. You have to get out…

These prisons were created as the architecture for a game project called ‘Dystopias’ for the Thief 2 engine. The designs draw inspiration from Piranesi’s Carceri engravings of impossible prisons, and the graphic stories of Schuiten and Peeters. The Thief engine is a good match for the atmosphere, as it emphasizes awareness of darkness and keeping to the shadows, and a slow exploration approach.