#7 - April 2025 - Prisoner

13 Apr, 2025

This will contain full spoilers for Prisoner, so please be advised.

Prisoner is an interesting little PSX title. It's developed by Feycraft, a generally lesser known company active between 1994-2000, responsible for a small spread of neat games before going out of business. For example, Metal Fighter Miku is a spin-off from an anime series of the same name that's part VN, part combat where you're choosing commands in real time while animated cutscenes, stylized just like the actual anime, play out on screen showing the attack results. Himitsu Sentai Metamoro V Deluxe is a title focusing on a small group of young magical girls where you need to both develop their trust levels during their daily lives but also learn new keywords that you can then use as attacks when fighting the big bad villains. Marica: Shinjitsu no Sekai is a Saturn game that's somewhat closer to a traditional JRPG, though with some honestly gorgeous full body art for all the attack animations and dialogue. (I'd actually recommend you go look it up on Youtube if you have the time, just to check out the art!!)

But we're not here to talk about any of those! Their other games are just an interesting consideration in light of Prisoner which is what we're actually here to talk about. Prisoner is yet another game from Feycraft with VN elements... sort of. Instead of being an RPG or some kind of QTE-based fighting game, this time the other genre to complement the VN side is "top-down shooter".

Prisoner never made it overseas, and thanks to a translation patch from Chapu Translations, it's now playable in English. The translation came out in February 2025.

Prisoner follows the story of Fry, a 14 year kid who lives in a town known as Golden Dawn. Based off the intro, you'd be forgiven for thinking Prisoner might be in some kind of post-apocalyptic setting--Golden Dawn is clearly some kind of indoor enclosure or cave of some kind, people live in tents, society is small, and people don't really do much of anything but farm and try to live on. This hardly idyllic life comes to end as Fry's father, Gernack, passes away from disease. Fry isn't permitted to witness his death--seeing someone's soul off is only permitted to members of Golden Dawn's "staff". Fry is permitted to briefly move in with one of his friends, Rick, and is given the ability to choose his job now that he's of age.

There's only two options. Terraner (farmer), or Gunner. You don't really get to choose--Rick, your closest friend, is rather insistent you become a gunner like he is, especially since his dad, Barren, is the "gunchief". From then on out, you're given an infinite ammo bowgun, and sent out to the outskirts of Golden Dawn, to a place referred to as the outer zone, to go explore and bring back any selenium ore, a valuable material that some of the staff are able to process and... well, you don't get told what they actually do with it, really.

But before that, let's get into one of the big defining features of how Prisoner works. In Golden Dawn, and in very specific places outside of it, you can talk to NPCs, and many of them offer new terms for you to ask other NPCs about.

Anytime a word is in red--and this includes physical items!--you can choose to take it and store it. You can store 12 words at a time, although 3 slots are always taken up by Yes/No/Silence. Items also take up one slot each, which is why there are three copies of "Selenium Ore" in the above picture (Selenium, by itself, is just a term to inquire about Selenium generally). This is both interesting and a bit frustrating--if you ask about a word, it's gone for good if it was your only copy of that word. Sometimes asking about a word leads to learning new words, sometimes you just get more dialogue only. And learning some words can be blocked off over time. And, as noted, these are in direct conflict with your literal inventory space for keys or the selenium ore you've been tasked with bringing back.

So the next thing I'll say here is that after leaving Golden Dawn to go explore the outer zone, there are several hours of gameplay just consisting of running around rooms and shooting everything that moves, with no character interactions. Nearly every room in the game has enemies, ranging from hostile robots to aggressive animals. Most rooms stay clear once you kill everything in them, and oftentimes clearing a room causes items to drop--either ammo for the guns you'll find, grenades, healing items, or even more interestingly, logbooks from particular individuals or keycards you need to progress.

As you bring back selenium ore to the village, you'll eventually be tipped off about a village of rebels underground. This is a hint for what you need to actually do--bringing back ore doesn't really matter, although it does give you a free full heal since for every ore you return you'll be told to go ahead and take the remainder of the day off. And so, you return to the outer zone. And you go through floors upon floors. And you shoot everything that moves. And you'll do this for several ours. You'll even come across some well-preserved but abandoned living quarters in the basement levels, but mostly, it'll be more aggressive animals and robots to shoot.

To put things into perspective, most floors probably take around 10-15 minutes to run through. Your early guns are weak, healing is a finite resource, so you do need to be careful and you can't facetank every single enemy you run into. You'll frequently have to backtrack across floors--perhaps you found a locked door, but the key was at the opposite end of the floor in a room you missed. Your travels will take you from B1 to B6, and then an elevator takes you all the way to floor B20 where you resume exploring.

One of the main pain points begins to rear its head here. Prisoner absolutely cannot get enough of rotating bridge puzzles.

Floors B20-B24 are the start of puzzles based on needing to hit switches to rotate the orientation of certain rooms. While the minimap helpfully highlights a room in red if it was just rotated, it doesn't tell you the actual state of it, so this can turn into a LOT of back and forth time wasting. This is made a little more complicated since some minor rooms, like hallways, have infinitely respawning enemies to get in your way. Floors B23-B24 even have a multi-floor rotational puzzle where the switches affect the room orientation on the opposite floor.

I'll again stress that there's no dialogue going on during any of this--it's just Fry in the desolate and lonely outer zone, killing everything in sight. You do start finding a lot of very brief logbooks from the "Chief", "Captain", and "Crew" alluding to a number of concerning developments that took place in the past, though, involving some form of crew mutiny and a so-called Science Cult.

After going through floors B20-B30, you finally meet the first character you get to talk to in like 5+ hours of gameplay. It's been so long that the game has to remind you how to properly talk to an NPC--yes, you can engage your gun's safety, and yes, you can accidentally friendly fire and kill NPCs. Polisha is one of the so-called "rebels" from the underground town of Beirak, and you save her from some hostile outer zone enemies and end up escorting her back since she's blind. You meet with her father, and at this point you start learning a bit more about Prisoner's setting.

Talking with Polisha and her injured father, Fyzer, makes it clear that there was a huge war between Beirak and Golden Dawn. Fyzer claims to be a descendant tasked with passing down a certain legend--his ancestors once rebelled against the Captain, fighting broke out, and the outer zone went from a living space to a battlefield now only inhabited by monsters. Beirak is there to protect a place called the Bridge. Everyone else in Beirak except Polisha and Fyzer are dead--either they've been killed by Golden Dawn's Gunners, succumbed to disease, or just perished in the outer zone. This conversation is actually pretty fascinating because you can talk to both Polisha and Fyzer and ask them about key terms you may have been storing since the intro of the game and they actually have reactions to all of them!

Which, you know, is a problem since that was so many hours of gameplay ago and you probably don't even have a full inventory of words to use, especially not with keys and selenium ore taking up space. It's pretty cool that you do get rewarded if you held onto certain terms though--they'll even respond if you talk about "Dad's Farm", a particular joint word you can only get by combining the name of Fry's father, Gernack, with the term "farm". I think you can't even get Gernack's name as a word to use past the very start, so it's a fairly niche one to hold onto.

Either way, Fyzer sends Fry and Polisha off to the Bridge, whereupon the two find a living space that looks eerily like Golden Dawn, and also an actual honest to goodness spaceship bridge room, where they can see space in all its beauty. Not that they know what space really is. The main computer of Golden Dawn, SOLG721, introduces itself and confirms the big plot reveal that the player has probably either already worked their way to or is on the cusp of realizing.

Golden Dawn is, itself, a giant spaceship. You can ask SOLG about numerous terms (yes, condolences if you used up all your words talking with Polisha and Fyzer previously) but the important thing is that Golden Dawn was launched with the intent of finding a new planet for humanity to colonize due to a shortage of resources. Fry seems aghast that he's just now learning what "space" is, and SOLG eerily replies that its records haven't been updated for 150 years, and cannot deduce why Fry would have never been told. Interestingly, despite Golden Dawn (the town) having an individual known as the Captain, SOLG will respond that there's no captain since the previous captain died in Staryear 184--this tracks logically since its records are out of date, but of course raises some very well-founded concerns about why there's still someone still going by that title.

Golden Dawn is 259 light years from Earth. Returning is impossible, there's not enough resources. It's also on autopilot towards the final of the five planets it was sent to investigate, Sigma-1892. If the crew wants to survive, they must take the WS-147 survey craft once Golden Dawn arrives and colonize the planet. Golden Dawn will arrive in two weeks, and its systems are slowly failing, so past that point anyone who tries to stay behind is going to die.

... And so, Fry and Polisha return to Fyzer to inform him of their discoveries. Fyzer urges them to warn the people of Golden Dawn of the impending disaster, and soon succumbs to his illness after asking Polisha to keep traveling with you. After finding a shortcut back to Golden Dawn, Fry is determined to be a criminal and is arrested, because he dared to bring back a "rebel" with him--even though Polisha is just a young blind girl. You get put on trial in an actually very cool series of cutscenes that are all rapid fire. First, one of the "Syuhns" cult priests interviews you during the tribunal, followed by Renfroe, a member of the staff who serves as a technical advisor. While they'll occasionally react to certain words, the only way to advance the game is to keep insisting upon the "voyage destination" word you learn from SOLG, causing Fry to try to explain that Golden Dawn is a spaceship meant to be colonizing planets and that they need to colonize Sigma-1892 or they'll all die.

Of course, everything's Fry is saying sounds like the ravings of a madman--clearly, he's been seduced by some rebel trickery. Gein seems somewhat intrigued, but the final person on the tribunal is the supposed Captain of Golden Dawn, who comes out verbally swinging at Fry and antagonizing him up until he suddenly begins screaming about how a new will has entered his body, and makes a new religious proclamation--God has spoken to him and declared that an outsider will visit Golden Dawn and save them all, and that outsider is Polisha, and as such, everything will be safe. Furthermore, Fry is to be put to death for spreading unrest with the whole "everyone on Golden Dawn is going to die in two weeks" nonsense.

If it isn't obvious--the Captain is bullshitting and wants Polisha for other reasons I won't elaborate on. While Fry waits in prison with Polisha--Fry for his execution, and Polisha for her upcoming relocation to live with the Captain--a revolt breaks out under the command of Gein, one of the staff members, who kills the Captain. Renfroe, who's loyal to Gein, comes by to free Fry and Polisha, and things seems great and it looks like everyone's come to an understanding.

... Up until Gein explains he now needs to kill Fry once Fry begins insisting on Golden Dawn's voyage once more--he knows too much and he's going to disrupt the new order under Lord Gein. And so, Fry and Polisha retreat into the outer zone, never to return to the town of Golden Dawn ever again.

What follows is another huge stretch of gameplay with minimal dialogue interactions. You end up finding a lot more logbooks that piece together the past of the Golden Dawn--it seems the previous Captain got cold feet regarding some crew member deaths when 4/5 of the colonization targets were duds, tried to cancel the mission to instead return home, and when the Chief of Pilots tried to force him to step down, the Captain went ballistic, rallied as many people to his side as possible, and put down any opposition to his command by force. Those rebels, led by the Chief of Pilots Beirak (yes--the rebel town of Beirak was named after him) were cast out into the depths of the outer zone. The Captain, believing society could live on in the upper reaches of Golden Dawn if they reverted to a more primitive class system and stopped relying upon technology, began to rule with an iron grip, backed by some supposed priests of the Science Cult, now calling themselves believers of "Syuhns".

Eventually, Fry and Polisha find WS-147, the survey craft meant to colonize Sigma-1892. SOLG chimes in to confirm their final objectives--they need to bring an ID card for a pilot second class or above, and 3 units of food and water to the survey craft and then they can depart. The ID card just requires a brief trip down to the Main Control Room and using a blank ID card on the terminal there so SOLG can update its registration (SOLG actually seems to suggest it's willing to give Fry a better designation, but Fry is content to take the bare minimum of second class pilot).

The 3 units of food and water, however, are where Prisoner decides to mess with you one last time. Tired of rotating bridges for puzzles? Too bad!!!

Bear with the bad diagram here while I try to lay this out.

• The Food and Water can be found in the top-most and right-most rooms labelled Food/Water, respectively. They are in separate rooms.
• The rooms labelled 1, 2, and 3 all have a set of three switches. Each button in each room controls the orientation of three of the rooms in that middle 3x3 grid, rotating the rooms to allow horizontal or vertical traversal. Only one button in each room can be active at a time, so thankfully this reduces the number of possible combinations to check.
• To get the food, you simply need to align a path vertically, go up to the room, kill the enemies there, and grab the food. This applies to the other 2 rooms as well.
• To get the water, you have to become a psychic.

The water has an extra catch with acquiring it--each room leading to one of the three necessary water supplies has an extra lever. Hitting the lever will tell you nothing happens. This is where the rooms labelled A, B, and C come in to play. They each have their own lever that does nothing by itself--and if you hit the "wrong" ones in A, B, or C and then try to open one of the water supply rooms, they'll reset. So then, what are the right ones? What permutation of switches in the A, B, and C rooms will cause the switches by room 4 to properly open up to the water supplies?

The answer lies in how room 4 works. Room 4 has its own set of 3-way switches. Each switch will open the pathway to one of the water supplies, and also will open up two specific paths to A, B, or C. So one water supply might correspond to AB, another to BC, and then to AC. For whichever path is open, you have to go to the appropriate ABC rooms, hit only those switches, and then return to the water supply room you wanted to open up and hit the switch there. Then you can claim that one water supply, and then you have to redo this for the other two water supplies, which requires going back to rooms 1, 2, and 3 to keep rotating the bridges to allow traversal to the correct A, B, C rooms.

It's a nightmare! It's the worst! ARGH! The mechanics of the water supply switches aren't even explained to you! And some of the rooms here have respawning enemies with guns, so you'll have to keep carefully dealing with them during all the backtracking you'll inevitably do!

Anyway, after all that's done you get a victory lap on the way back to WS-147, where you're forced to take an alternate path that leads to a boss rush with two boss re-fights, and a slightly unsettling final boss with entirely too much HP that hits fairly hard at a time when your supplies are already probably getting low, though it's ultimately not that bad once you learn the gaps in its attack patterns. It's not explained what it's meant to be, incidentally, but presumably it's some kind of awful science experiment since it's made clear that Golden Dawn was doing all kinds of research and experiments with animals, thus leading to a lot of the enemies you fight on your way down to B50. After that, you get to board WS-147 with Polisha¹, and depart for Sigma-1892.

If you got the good ending--unlike me, see the footnote above--the ending text crawl reads as follows. This is verbatim to the original Japanese release: "A long trip tries to be finished. It was safe, and went to all of the members companion, the new world as for you. So, do you despair of a thing to wait if you are happy? Now, escape from the closing space succeeded. That mankind's new story begins from here."²

Will Fry and Polisha succeed in colonizing Sigma-1892? Who knows, but Fry's a literal 14 year old kid and Polisha's blind, so even with SOLG's guidance.. that seems like a tall order. Worse yet, you learn from SOLG that even though the purpose of Golden Dawn's colonization trip was due to a resource shortage on Earth, Earth managed to fabricate some new material that resolved this issue during Golden Dawn's voyage--so the trip is pointless. And, worst of all, SOLG states that even if Sigma-1892's colonization is successful, they'll never be able to contact Earth anyway which is now hundreds of light years away. It's pretty grim!

I think Prisoner is both pretty cool and also very frustrating. The sorta VN gameplay where you can take words from certain conversations and use them to talk to other characters is cool but extremely underutilized, resulting in multiple cases of conversations where you'll miss out on some unique responses just because you literally didn't have the room to hoard all the words you wanted, or worse, because two of the last main chances you have to use this system take place back to back (Polisha and Fyzer back in Beirak, and then the first meeting with SOLG) with no chance to return to Golden Dawn to maybe "restock" on words, as silly as that sounds.

The actual top-down shooter gameplay is serviceable and fluid, but also very frustrating because there is so much combat. Nearly every room has enemies, and since careful gameplay makes clearing rooms very lucrative for staying ahead of the game on healing items and ammo, you're extra incentivized to clear rooms out but to take it slowly to be safe. Plus, well, sometimes they do drop mandatory keys for plot progress, so... you never really had a choice. The shift to fighting humans later in the game is a drag--once you're on the run from Lord Gein--because humans all have incredibly tiny hitboxes and are fighting you with actual guns and flamethrowers rather than animals trying to chase you down or shooting slower moving projectiles. My optimal room clearing strategy turned into nonsense like throwing flashbangs out every 2-3 seconds to keep them stunlocked, since health becomes a very precious resource by the end, so shutting off their ability to fight back makes a huge difference.

Since I did allude to boss fights earlier--they do exist but they're mostly not very interesting. 3-4 of them are centipedes which patrol the room in a set pattern occasionally shooting at you or breathing fire, and shooting their head is the only way to damage them. A couple more bosses are some kind of... eyeball robots? that slowly float around shooting you, orbited by other robots that act as a shield you have to blow past first. Every boss besides the last boss is just one of those two bosses, either reskinned or sometimes there's two centipedes instead of one.

You do find different weapons to use which is admittedly pretty neat. The machine gun starts off a bit suspect due to bad range, but you later find a new version that is a bullet hose that can reach the opposite end of the screen and boasts incredible DPS. The laser rifle shoots slowly and has a very thin projectile but hits hard, and if you find one secret--that I missed, grumble grumble--it upgrades a freakishly strong three-way lightning beam that even curves to hit targets. The flamethrower shuts off enemy AI completely if they're not immune to it, causing them to run around and making other enemies (or Fry!) catch on fire too. And the rocket launcher boasts incredible AOE damage, and thankfully, cannot friendly fire you. There's also basic grenades (they just deal damage), incendiary grenades (they set enemies on fire), and flashbangs (stuns enemies, can even cancel out bullets on screen if the enemy can be stunned). You'll have thrown hundreds of these grenades by the time the game ends. Sometimes it honestly feels more like you're secretly playing Smash TV, or something. The variation in guns/grenades does help to spice things up just a little bit, which is good given the comical amount of combat you'll be doing between the actual story events.

On a different note, the music is pretty nice! The outer zone has around a half dozen tracks that play based on which floors you're on, ranging from slightly more slightly more upbeat tunes that really hit home that feeling of having almost finally escaped Golden Dawn as you get to the final floors, to more inquisitive, somber tracks as if you're exploring long lost ancient ruins earlier in the game. There's a nice spread, and I actually really liked some of them. Boss fights get their own theme too despite the fact that there's only a couple, and it's actually a cool one too. Beirak, Golden Dawn, and other in-between plot beats all have their own tracks as well, though you get to hear a lot less of them.

A lot of NPCs also have their own character art, even if they barely factor in to the game. Vince here basically doesn't exist past the intro--he's the staff member who watches over Gernack when he dies, but even he gets his own portrait! Maybe there was more planned for him later...?

I'd probably have a hard time actively recommending Prisoner to someone just due to the obnoxious puzzles involving all the back and forth treks to rotate rooms properly and the shift of dialogue:gameplay being so absurdly slanted towards the gameplay, but I genuinely still love it despite all that. It's ambitious, the final stretch of the gameplay's puzzles are honestly miserable, it doesn't quite stick the landing, but it's certainly memorable.

I have a feeling there's almost certainly some oddball things you can do that might get some unique dialogue--you can get Polisha killed for example, so her father never talks to you and I assume might change the outcome of what happens when you return to Golden Dawn--though it's equally likely they still imprison Fry for going on about the whole spaceship business, anyway. Or if you decide to murder random Golden Dawn civilians, the whole town goes aggro on you, which I imagine might also affect things later. They're interesting possibilities, but also... well, the game is really too long for me to want to find out myself.

For fun, I transcribed all of the logbooks you find in the game here, if you feel bizarrely urged to become a Prisoner loremaster. I mostly only did this because they're only readable when you first pick them up, which felt like a waste to me.

Honestly, a lot of it is a bit redundant and repeats stuff you learn in the game, but it does give you a clearer picture of what things looked like when the Golden Dawn first set out on its voyage.

Footnotes: