Yet another gem for 2025! Back to the Dawn brings - in an anthropomorphic style - a genuine prison experience. You play the role of Thomas, a fox journalist who investigates the corruption of the current mayor and is about to release the information to the public. However, his enemies work faster than him and manage to trap him and make him land in jail (corrupt cops, there too).

So your ass is now in prison, and you have very little contact with the exterior, apart from your lawyer, and a few calls now and then, to get things done. This is a 2D, top-down view adventure/RPG game, with highly detailed pixel graphics.

First, survive

At the start you basically get used to the prison life. The day is always structured in the same way:

• Get up, go to the headcount where they give specific instructions for the day
• From 8 to 12, you have free time that you should be using for work, to make money.
• Lunch time from 12 to 1 pm.
• Afternoon: from 1 to 6h30 pm, to exercise in the court, interact with others, go to the chapel or the library
• Dinner after 6h30pm
• Evening is free time until lockdown at 10pm.
• Sleep after lockdown?

Each part of the day has a clear function.

In the morning you should absolutely use your time to make money. Despite what you may think, everything costs money in this jail, and money buys you options and better comfort. Like a better lunch, some amenities for your cell, and access to services offered by the prison gangs. For example, the library is off limits if you don’t pay for the entrance. Want to exercise in the court by lifting weights? You gotta pay, again. Want to watch TV at night? Don’t forget to pay!

At the beginning the only work you can do is pretty much limited to the laundry work. Doing work is either some random throw of dice that you keep on rolling until you reach a specific threshold (for example, 50). Each time you roll dice, you will lose time on the clock. Some other work activities are mini-games, like QTEs, to make it more under your control. Once you get used to some work (as in, you did it enough times), you are given the option to just let it run by itself. You won’t get the highest earnings possible this way, but this removes the QTE and mini-games.

After a while, if you don’t cause trouble, you will be rewarded with good conduct points on a daily basis, and you can use such points to ask for different type of work. Roof work, kitchen work, mailroom work, etc… Some of it is more rewarding.

You earn more, or it’s less taxing on your abilities. Talking about abilities, you have two that actually matter to do any kind of action. Focus points (you start with 5) and Stamina (you start with like 100). All work activity will use stamina points - and if it’s very physical work, it will consume more of it. Focus points are used when doing intellectual tasks, or so to say. For example, if you try to befriend someone, you need to use Focus points to do that. You can gain back these points by resting for a while.

These actions points are great, but you need to be super careful at two health bars for your character: Body and Mind. The game tells you to pay attention about them, but they don’t nearly tell you how important they are. Body points measure, out of 100, how in shape you are. If you don’t eat enough, don’t sleep enough, don’t rest enough, your health will deteriorate quickly and your body points will gradually decrease. Go under 30, and you are in danger zone. But what does danger actually mean? Well, stay several days below 30 by the time you go to sleep, and Thomas will fall into a coma, and it’s game over. Ouch! That’s bad.

How about Mind? Mind points are all about measuring your mental state. You start with 100 too. If you get beaten up, if you don’t eat good food, if you get punished for your actions, if you fail too many dice challenges, if you don’t purposely try to have some fun, you will quickly lose Mind points. Go under 30, and when you sleep, you will face scary nightmares that you make you lose Mind points even faster. Stay under 30 for too long, and Thomas will end up becoming crazy and be sent to a mental hospital. Game over, too.

That’s one of the main issue I have in the game. I feel like they didn’t scare you enough about the importance of such attributes. Now that I have seen the bad endings that they end up bringing, I am very clear that my eyes need to watch where they are at all times. You have many ways to recover such points - Body is easy: just buy good food (i.e. spend money) or snacks, sleep well, and they will recover. Mind is more tricky: watching TV, playing video games, buying certain snacks, drinking alcohol, will help recover Mind, among other things.

As you can see, keeping these under control require… money! So it’s extremely critical that you establish a routine to secure money every day, and in a sufficient amount to keep you alive and well.

Becoming Stronger

You are a feeble journalist after all. You are not made for prison life, and certainly not up for fighting back against other prisoners. Your first fight in jail will land you in the infirmary for a whole day. This will be a good way to get to know that you can get (i.e. steal) some meds from there for different purposes (for your own consumption, or also to resell them). Also, this will make you realize you need to beef up so that you are less prone to losing a fight.

To do that you need to start building your other stats, such as Strength. Increasing Strength means doing more physical activities, like weight lifting. When you do so, you get points from this activity, and if you check your profile menu, you can spend such points to unlock skills. Skills will grant you a bunch of different bonuses to make you even stronger, better at fighting and so on. You have similar stats for Intelligence, Charisma, Agility. You can raise your intelligence by reading books, too, or doing some work that is more intellectual in nature. Agility goes up when you do work that relies on the dexterity of your hands.

Long story short, choosing your activities to raise your stats in the different categories, unlocking skills, will make you much more resilient from the different threats you face in prison.

Another way to defend yourself is to build rapport with other mates in prison. After you befriend someone, you can chat with them (which increase your rapport score with them), trade, and even give them gifts. Some of the prison members are part of three different gangs, and gangs can provide you some additional protection once you become a member. To belong to a gang you need to increase your reputation with their members, and you do that by completing quests for the said gang. Another way to make yourself more desirable is to participate in the secret boxing matches that occur at night several times in the weak. If you manage to become a formidable fighter, gangs will want to consider you more and more.

Fighting is turn-based, just like in old school RPGs. You can fight bare-hands (or bare claws!) or use some of the stuff you have on you to cause some more damage (improvised weapons, like a glass shank, or a piece of wood on which you attached nails). You use special skills you have unlocked to help you get an edge. For example, a skill called distract will make the enemy look somewhere else for one turn, which gives you the opportunity to strike at full strength for the next hit.

Beyond fighting, you will be able to unlock activities such as stealing and extortion. You can steal from any other prison mate in the jail: you get to see what you can possibly steal, as well as your odds to be successful. And then it’s a roll of dice to decide whether you could do it or not. If you fail on the first roll, you can retry by spending 2 focus points (if you have enough left). If you fail, the target will notice what you were trying to do, and your rapport with them will fall to almost zero. You won’t be able to chat or exchange with them until you try to reconcile with them (which means spending money!).

Thriving Beyond Survival

Once you start getting the hang of the prison life, and manage to have a stable flux of money, you need to start thinking ahead. Ultimately you need to escape the prison, because the system is rigged against you, and there is not much that your lawyer can do to get you out anytime soon. There is also a mayoral election coming up soon, and if you miss that chance to expose the corruption of the current one, you could be stuck in jail for a long, loooong time.

To plan your escape, you need to find where are the gaps in the jail’s security systems. Potential paths for an exit. And of course, there’s not going to be anything that’s obvious from the get-go. This will require a lot of hear-say, a lot of befriending the guards, and some nighttime exploration to go in areas that are off-limits during the day. There is a vast amount of locations to visit and to explore, and secrets to discover. And once you identify a potential exit, nothing is ever too simple, and it will require careful planning and item crafting to get there.

Still, once you reach a certain stage, life in prison becomes a routine and you can start spending your extra energy on your escape. And seeing your character make progress step by step is very exciting.

Absolutely great

Back to the Dawn is incredibly polished. I really like how the game starts by letting you discover things by one, and progressively adds more and more possibilities in a very subtle way. And it’s not just adding options, it’s adding a lot of different ways on how you can decide to play the game. You can try to become an influential gang member and live by being feared. Or you can try to be nice, avoid confrontations, and focus on making money and building up your skills, completing quests and getting advancements.

There are at least 5 escape routes that you can try, and each of them is unlocked in a very different way. There are tons of conversations that you can unlock in the game, and in one run there is no way you can do everything. With the constant focus on make good use of your time you have to decide your own priorities every single day, and optimize as you go to make sure you progress fast enough.

The mix of a structured gameplay (the way the day is organized) and the freedom given to you in each chunk of the day works wonder. This means that you are constantly playing a different phase of the game, which removes the potential for boredom. And since new stuff happens regularly, it’s not a complete routine either.

I’ll stop here, but Back to the Dawn is one of the best things to come out in 2025. It’s stylish, the music is decent and engaging, the animations are cute, and the gameplay is just flawless. It works extremely well on portable devices too, and is a pleasure on the Steam Deck, where it completely deserves its Verified rating. As you can imagine, it lands directly into our recommended games list.