Back to the Dawn - Of prisons, routines, and corruption

Time estimate: 28 - 34 hours (Thomas [Fox] Playthough)
Available: XBox,Steam
Game Type: Narrative based Slice of Life RPG with resource management elements
Elements of Game not Reviewed: Bob [Panther] Playthrough, combat elements

Back to the Dawn is a computer game where your character Thomas, a fox journalist, ends up in prison by a corrupt mayor looking to quash a story about a facility plant polluting a nearby community that the politician’s relatives “allegedly” have some stake in. Your imprisonment comes 21 days before the re-election campaign that will ensure his corruption will remain for many years to come. In this game and story you will need to lead Thomas on his mission to prove his innocence, or perhaps find a way to flee the prison and corrupt metropolis that has put a target on his back.

This is a life simulator RPG mixed with time and resource management. You’ll need to play to your strengths to acquire items and information that can help you on your journey to freedom, all while the system wants to break your mind and body so that you give up or give in.

You can also play as another character who acts as an NPC in Thomas’s quest. Bob the black panther is an undercover officer who is assigned to the prison and has an entire quest unique to him. I did not play that to review however.

Spoilerless review

The focus of this game will be you learning about your inmates, and exploiting what you can to make progress with help of friends on the outside to succeed in proving your case against this frame job. While in this internet age there are many guides to help you do so, my suggestion would be to go into it with relative blindness for your first journey. The odds are against you here, and should you fail I think it leaves an important mark on you, as you will at some point feel as hopeless as your character does when something doesn’t go quite the way you expected or wanted to.

And should you fail this first round it leaves upon the player an importance on ensuring that the justice systems we employ for our safety as a whole don't get co-opted to be used for just the safety of those in power. Because if you find yourself in a system such as that, what once you felt protected you will easily become your biggest threat.

Lower difficulties do allow you to turn back time to try a day again should you make a drastic error, but I feel that while this may expedite the experience towards a positive ending and completing the game, it can take away from the sense of dread as the you watch your time slip away from you as you try to accomplish a goal before the lunch bell hits and forces you to finish your urgent task for the next day. It has that feeling that you may experience when you are reminded of mortality. That sense of urgency, and regret should you not have accomplished the tasks you wished to. You have to balance your needs of health, mind, stamina, focus, and money while pushing forward with your goals, so you never get bored, which is ironic for being locked away. It is also a lengthy game and will probably take 20-30 hours or so to do a single play though.

The characters of the prison are well written, each of them having a fleshed out backstory on why they are here that you can unlock by gaining rapport with them. Gaining friendship also allows you access to more special items to buy and some abilities as a bonus of your friendship. There are three gangs, each with different motives and ideals that you can do business with, or join if you’re feeling so bold.

The story is also very well written and has many different ways of approaching the problem at hand even with just the Thomas playthrough that I experienced. There is a whole other character you can play in the game, a black panther, that I had not. It wears its inspirations on its sleeve. Referencing films such as the Shawshank Redemption.

One of my criticisms of the game is that this prison is actually a bit loose when it comes to how it runs things. There are three different colors of uniforms to indicate the person’s “security” level which is based on the type of crime they committed (red, orange, and blue), however this doesn’t have any impact on how these prisoners are treated or segregated in this prison as they all interact with one another rather freely. Another small gripe about world building is the diversity of the prisoners in this society. On one hand it was perhaps the right thing to do gameplay wise as it makes prisoners easier to distinguish from one another to have them all different species, and it’s great artistically, but typically prison states are not so diverse in who they choose to put behind bars.

There is also a fighting mechanic, but like any good modern RPG you can actually try to avoid fighting as much as you can. Or you could lean into it and use your strength to your advantage. Personally I did not end up using the combat mechanic enough to review it.

And after you complete your first round, as imperfect as it will be, you will come back in with an appreciation of it and an understanding that will help you do better the next time. They even let you keep your accomplished rapport and items in a new game plus format so that with the knowledge and tools your second go will more than likely succeed. However, the fact that failure is pretty common for those that complete the game, that itself can show how scary it can be to try to seek freedom and injustice in a world out to keep it from you, and how the odds truly are against you.

If this sounds interesting to you, give it a play. The next section goes over more personal experiences with my own playthrough that goes into details of quests and events.

Spoiler Section - Reflections of Routine

What the game did well for me is show how a good system can lock you into its routines and how if you get lost and dependent on them too much you could end up missing out on important factors that are necessary to actually improve your position.

The game is quite simple in design, but does not hold your hand, there were a few mechanics I had to learn the hard way, one including the need to relieve oneself before you accidentally defecate yourself. And because I overlooked that mechanic I also overlooked the fact that there is a toilet in your personal prison cell. And that meant that I got a late start in discovering that the toilet could be messed with to pull it away from the wall and allow me to look for escape routes after dark. Of course even that doesn’t come easy. You need to find a tool to use on the toilet, then you need to acquire materials for a dummy to keep in your bed while you’re skulking around in the night.

The quest lines in this game all have this well crafted feeling of knowing what you want to do but throwing an obstacle that will require you to focus on something else so you can get back on the main thread. All the while you have to keep up routines. And those routines, they can get dangerous because while you are making moves the other characters of the prison are making theirs’.

Which brings us to the three gangs of the prison. At the start of my playthrough I saw them as stand ins for the three classes found in most traditional RPGs: The Big Foot gang representing the warrior or barbarian class, the Sharptooth gang representing thieves, and the Black Claw gang the wizards, of course financial and intellectual wizards in this case but wizards none the less.

And while that metaphor is pretty accurate, another dimension emerges in these organizations as you come close to the end of the game. The gangs are organizations that represent the wills and desires of the powers that rule over the prison itself, in sort of a carnival mirror kind of way. The Big Foot gang desires to rule by strength, and it turns out they are working with Bruce, the head of the guards, in order to maintain a might-makes-right order. The Black Claw and their financial scheming are tied with the warden who uses the debt funds they raise to line his own pockets.

So what about the Sharptooth gang? Well they don’t represent anything. But it’s not in a lame kind of centrist or neutral way, even though it can seem that way on the surface. Looking up an ending I didn’t get, if you complete particular quests for their leader, Alex, you can find him in the kitchen during the riot scene that occurs five days to the election. He is disguised as a guard and using the riot as a means to escape dressed up like a guard. When you engage with him at this moment, he mentions the riot, caused by the other two gangs, could be used by him as a distraction. He criticizes those other gang leaders noting that by making such shallow moves simply over who gets to control of the prison it proves they have given up on freedom and instead have settled into their roles in prison. Their gang positions act as anchors to their identity as prisoners, making them blind to the goal they should have of being free of it.

Even as a free person, it is good to have a reminder that the reason we work is to be free, not to work more.

Back to my playthrough, I myself noticed how my routines in prison could sometimes work against my goal. I didn’t store provisions for myself because food was regular and I usually had the money to afford it. This came crashing down when the riot broke out in the third act of the game, though. In my playthrough Bruce came out on top and put a one day lockdown in place in retaliation for the riot, without any food being offered. I had one cookie to my name at that time that didn’t keep me fed for the 24 hours. Because of this as soon as I was out of the cage, I was in the infirmary recovering from the damage my starvation had caused, costing me time I certainly could not afford.

The event had thrown a wrench into many of my plans and made the tight deadline ahead only that much tighter, especially since I had neglected to fully clear the grate in the staff room blocking my path forward for my night excursions meaning the two days were truly and fully lost. This evoked a sense of panic in me that I rarely feel in games, dread of missed opportunities and panic if I was going to actually get out. I did not, I made it to the garden guarded by two guards trying to get to the laundry facility where I had the hatch ready to open to slip out. I did not have the agility to sneak past successfully.

In reflection, my sense of developing a routine to prevent urgent things did not account at all for the exceptionally unusual event that was caused by the riot. This shows how reliant I was in those routines and systems. Becoming dependent on it can give blind spots that can come back to bite later. On the other hand, some people expect the exceptional so much that it can be detrimental to them getting ahead in life, stockpiling food, weapons, or other items just in case. To be the most successful one must strike the balance between self-reliant preparedness and reliance of others and the system.

Now more than ever, understanding how the riot impacted your first playthrough when you didn’t know when it was fully coming can tell you a lot about yourself and what flaws you may have in dealing with a crisis situation. And perhaps now more than ever is a good time to learn such lessons.

Now sure, a person could theoretically succeed in the first playthrough, and they will sit from upon high and brag about how they got out. And if you do have a story like that feel free to share, noting the story will contain spoilers first, of course. But, I will say that by doing so the boasting misses the point and proves the point entirely at the same time.

Survivorship bias is a thing, for every story of a harrowing escape from prison you hear of there is probably at least one other story of it going terribly wrong. This aligns with the statistics of the achievements for the game. 19% get the bad end and 22% get the good. But remember there is a time reversal mechanic that bumps things in favor of the good, and some gamers may use a walk through as well which can also bump things in the good end’s favor. The fact that it's only at the time of the writing a 3% difference is stark.

Like the dice rolling mechanics of the game highlight, in a world left to corrupt to this degree much more is left to chance than we should be comfortable with. In failing, you will receive that message much more than a person that succeeds on their first time.