Frequently asked

What is Prison Break: Thirty Walls?

A single-player and co-op escape game for Windows. You are in a prison that runs to a timetable, and you are trying to get out of it without being seen doing anything you should not be doing. There are thirty of them, each one harder than the last, and none of them drawn by hand.

What do you actually do?

The first prison is the whole game in miniature: find the shovel, get it back to your cell without a guard seeing it in your hands, and dig. Everything after that is the same idea with more in the way — the shovel behind a locked door, the key on a guard, the guard with a club, cameras watching the corridor you need, drones in the yard at night.

The clock is the other half of it. The prison runs on a daily timetable, and the timetable decides what counts as suspicious. Standing in the yard at yard time is nothing. Standing in the same spot at lockdown is the alarm going off.

How many levels, and how long does it take?

Thirty. They get bigger and more watched as you go: by level twelve there is a locked door between you and the tool you need, by eighteen the guard holding the key is armed, and the last ones run to several storeys with cameras, drones and towers all asking the same question at once.

How long that takes is honestly up to you, because a level ends when you get out of it and not on a timer. Some are twenty minutes. Some are an evening.

Is every prison really generated?

Yes, apart from the first one, which is laid out by hand as a tutorial. Every other prison is built from a plan and a number the moment you press Play — the cell blocks, the yard, the routes the guards walk, where the cameras look, and where the one soft patch of floor is.

Can I replay a prison I liked?

Every level has a seed, and the same seed always builds the same building. The seed is shown in the level information and is included automatically whenever you report a bug, which is how a broken prison can be looked at rather than guessed about.

Why does it say there are no art assets?

Because there are none. There is not a single texture, model or material file in the game: every wall, every set of bars, every sign and every light is written as code and built when the game starts. It is the rule the whole project is built around.

The practical upshot is a game that is very small to download and that can build a prison nobody has ever seen before without needing anything new on disk. The cost is that it looks like what it is — concrete, sodium light and shadow, rather than hand-sculpted detail.

Is there co-op?

Yes, for two to four of you. Host a game and invite Steam friends, or accept an invitation from the friends list; on the same network you can play without Steam involved. Co-op needs no account — your friends join your game, not a service.

It changes how a level is played rather than making it easier. One of you carrying the shovel is one of you who cannot afford to be looked at; the other is the reason nobody is looking.

What happens when I get caught?

On your own, being caught ends the run. In co-op there is a setting the host chooses before hosting: with solitary turned on, being caught puts you back in a cell at the far end of the building and costs the crew hours rather than ending everybody's night because of one person's mistake.

What is Ares Deep?

A separate story on a research station on Mars, coming later as downloadable content. It is not part of Thirty Walls and is not included in it.

It inverts the premise: you are staff, with a badge and a shift and every right to be where you are standing. What you do not have is the clearance for the doors between you and an escape pod, and the facility has noticed what you found.

Where do I get it?

On Steam, for Windows — Prison Break: Thirty Walls.

What happened to the free beta?

It has ended. The builds that used to be handed out on GitHub have been replaced by a single last build whose only job is to tell you the game moved to Steam. If you are running an older test build it will offer to update you to that one.

I played the beta. Does my progress carry over?

On the same PC, yes. The Steam build reads the same saved progress the test builds wrote, so the levels you earned are still unlocked.

Two things deliberately do not come with you. The first time the Steam build runs it sets the screen and the graphics to suit the machine rather than keeping whatever a test build was last set to, because a tester's old small window is rarely the screen they actually have. And any level you reached with the testing keys rather than by playing is given back: a release hands you the level you actually earned.

What do I need to run it?

64-bit Windows 10 or 11. The full requirements go on the Steam page before release; they are not settled yet, and a number invented here would only be wrong later.

What the game does do is set itself up for your machine the first time it runs, rather than making you guess: integrated graphics, an unfamiliar card, or fewer than six CPU threads starts you on Medium, and a card with plenty of memory starts you on Ultra. After that first launch, whatever you choose stands.

Is there a Mac, Linux or Steam Deck version?

Windows only at the moment. There is no Mac or Linux build, and the Deck has not been tested or verified — if that changes it will be said on the Steam page rather than quietly.

It runs badly. What should I change?

Settings has a preset first — drop it a step before anything else, since it moves several things at once. After that, in rough order of what you get back for what you lose:

• Render scale, which is the single biggest lever if you are on a large screen.
• Shadows, which the prison uses a great deal of.
• Ambient occlusion, then anti-aliasing.

If it is not performance but something looking plainly wrong — a white rectangle where a sign should be, a floor that flickers — that is a bug and not a setting. Please tell us, and say which card you have.

What are the controls, and can I rebind them?

Mouse and keyboard. Look sensitivity is in Settings, along with the display mode and resolution.

Key rebinding is not in the game yet. It is one of the most asked-for things and it is on the tracker; adding your voice to it there is more useful than it sounds, because the tracker is how the order gets decided.

What languages is it in?

English only for now. There is no translation in the game yet.

Do I need an account?

No. An account keeps your progress with you rather than with the PC you played on, and puts your escape times on the leaderboards. Playing on your own without one works, and so does co-op — your friends join your game directly.

What does the account store?

The short answer is: enough to sign you in, enough to give your progress back, and nothing to do with advertising.

• Your display name, and your email address if you signed up with one. Signing in through Steam or Google means we hold the identifier they give us instead.
• Your password, if you have one, stored so it cannot be read back — not by us either.
• How far you have got in each campaign, and the runs you finished: which level, how long it took, and whether you got out.
• Which build you last played and the machine name it reported, which is what lets a broken release be spotted and stopped.

It is not sold, shared or passed to anyone. There is no advertising or analytics service in the game.

How do I delete my account?

Ask, and it goes — the account, the progress and the run records with it, not marked as deleted but actually removed. If you signed up with a password you can do it from the account screen in the game. If you signed in through Steam or Google, send the request through the form with the name you play under and it will be done by hand.

Can I play offline?

Yes. The single-player game does not need a connection. Without one your progress is kept on the PC you are playing on, and syncs when you next sign in.

How do I report a bug?

From inside the game, if it is running: the reporter sends everything about the situation along with your description, which makes a report perhaps ten times more useful than the same sentence typed anywhere else.

If the game will not start, or you are not at the PC it happened on, use the form on this site. Both end up in the same place, and both give you a reference number like PB-142 that you can quote later.

What does the in-game reporter send?

Everything you would not think to include, which is the point of it:

• The build, your operating system, and your graphics card and driver.
• Which level, and its seed, along with its shape, storeys, and how many cameras, drones and towers are in it.
• The day, the phase of the timetable, the clock, and whether the alarm was up.
• What you were carrying, and your suspicion level.
• Your graphics settings, and whether you were hosting or joining a co-op game.
• A screenshot of the game, and the last few hundred lines of the log.

It is sent when you press send and at no other time. The game does not report anything on its own.

Can I ask for a feature instead?

Please do. The same form takes feature requests — choose “a feature request” at the top and it goes to the people who decide what gets built next rather than into the pile of things that are broken. Requests show on the tracker alongside bugs, marked planned once they are going to happen.

How do I know if my bug is already known?

The tracker lists everything confirmed and everything recently fixed, with the build the fix went out in. If what you are seeing is on there, there is nothing you need to do. If it is not, it is worth telling us even if you think somebody must have noticed — often nobody has.

The game says it has moved to Steam and will not start

That is an old test build doing what it was told to do. The beta is over and those builds have been retired deliberately, so that nobody keeps playing a version months out of date and reporting problems that were fixed long ago. The Steam version is the game now, and your progress on that PC comes with you.

Who makes it?

Zitherian Studios — a very small operation, which is why the reports that come through the form are read by the person who will be fixing the thing.