Become a prison guard and spank bad girls into shape. In Hell. From the makers of Disgaea

Okay, so it's not quite the prison game Nathan asked for inhis featurethe other week, but hey, at least someone's trying something, right? The someone in this case is Nippon Ichi, developer of the ultra-hardcore Disgaea RPG series, and the something is Criminal Girls, a new top-down "RPG Where You Punish Girls" for the PSP, which has just been revealed by details leaked from this week's Dengeki PlayStation magazine. Hold on to your minds folks, for they are about to be blown. This one registers about a 9.7 on the "How Japanese?" scale...

In Criminal Girls, you'll play a prison warden. A prison warden of a female prison. And assuming that isn't already the coolest thing you've ever heard in your entire life, that prison IS ALSO HELL!

Now I presume that most of you are taking this news with the WTF sense of incredulous irony I am, but this being the internet I know it's naive to assume there won't be a few people getting excited about this in a very bad way. You know, the kind of bad way that leads to years of repression before inevitably letting it all out, then going a bit too far and getting arrested asthe result of a nationwide manhunt. So just to weedle those folk out, I'm going to give you some more details. Just let me know who I need to back away from when I'm done.

There are seven main prisoners in the game, each representing a different one of the seven deadly sins. It's your job to take each of them in hand and rehabilitatethe crap out of themuntil they're ready to rejoin the real world. And by 'rehabilitate', I mean 'get all sexy with', because you'll be have the option of punishing them with spankings, and well as be able to reward them for good behaviour with massages. But just to clarify the absolute innocence of these scenes, I want to add that we've also heard they'll make use of pixellated distortion on-screen to mask 'certain areas' Nothing to worry about though. Probably just the girls' faces ifthey lookunder-age*. They being criminals and all.

Quirky fun romp or nightmarish filthsplosion? It remains to be seen exactly what tone Criminal Girls takes, but in the meantime, give us your rampant speculation, internet. Day one purchase, or will you avoid it for fear of having to sign a register afterwards?

*Of course they'll look under-age.

David Houghton
Long-time GR+ writer Dave has been gaming with immense dedication ever since he failed dismally at some '80s arcade racer on a childhood day at the seaside (due to being too small to reach the controls without help). These days he's an enigmatic blend of beard-stroking narrative discussion and hard-hitting Psycho Crushers.