Planet Alcatraz Review — Russian Lost in Translation

Planet Alcatraz — «Санитары подземелий» or Dungeon Crawlers in Russian

— released in 2006 in Russia, and in 2009 internationally through Steam. A tactical squad RPG set on a prison planet.

There is also a Russian Sequel which was never translated... And a Fan did it with the Help of AI !

It sits at "Very Positive" across 602 Steam reviews, it costs about the price of a coffee, and almost nobody outside Russia has heard of it. But the most interesting thing about this game is... what happened to it on its way to English!

Lost in Translation: When Censorship Becomes Comedy

Here's the thing about Planet Alcatraz's English version: most of the offensive material was stripped out during localisation. Racial slurs, graphic sexual threats, homophobic abuse, references to prison rape...

— the Russian script had all of it, as prison-colony fiction tends to.

The English release doesn't. And the replacements are where it gets funny.

Because the translators didn't just cut the offending lines — they replaced them with something else, and whatever process produced those replacements defies explanation. The result reads less like a grim Russian Fallout and more like Monty Python doing a prison drama.

Some of my favourites, and I promise I'm not making these up:

• An extremely graphic sexual demand became — I'm quoting the English release — "Caress me, master."
• A furious "what the f---" became "I don't even want to swear."
• A homophobic slur became "They're disgusting."
• A crude sexual insult became, for reasons known only to god and the localisation team, "Aubergine." 🍆
• A threat involving sodomy became "I want to stick my knife in your belly" — apparently stabbing was fine 😉
• And "Whack the bastards!" got so overused that every single enemy seems to know exactly one sentence 😄

There are hundreds of these. The game was heavily censored, and the censorship is genuinely one of its charms in English — though it's worth remembering that the Russian version is a completely different, considerably darker experience.

Note that I'm describing this content rather than quoting it. You get the picture without me putting slurs on my own website, and frankly the "aubergine" tells you everything you need to know anyway. 😄

Matrosskaya Tishina: The Prison That Actually Exists

One detail I never picked up on: the prison planet has a name in the Russian version, and it's not fictional.

It's called Matrosskaya Tishina — "The Sailor's Silence" — which is the name of one of Moscow's most notorious real-world prisons. The developers didn't invent a sci-fi penal colony. They took an actual Russian prison, put it in orbit, and let their imagination do the rest.

The original Russian store description sets the tone better than any English blurb ever did. Roughly translated: "A prison-type planet where only the worst repeat offenders are exiled. Capsules packed with convicts are dropped onto the planet from orbit, and nobody cares whether the profusely swearing cargo survives the hard landing."

That's the game you're actually buying. The English version just wears a nicer coat.

How I Ended Up Here (and What Russian Games Do Right)

How did I come across Planet Alcatraz in the first place?

I'd already played a couple of games from Russian publisher 1C. First an old RPG called Evil Islands, which had some genuinely interesting ideas, and then a great space opera called Star Wolves.

And that's the pattern with Russian games of that era: they're bursting with innovative ideas — and they're buggy as hell. Sometimes you can't even complete a quest without figuring out a workaround yourself. It's a shame to see that much ingenuity spoiled by rough edges... Many times their publishers told the devs to rush the release 😕

But here's what I genuinely love about them, and Planet Alcatraz is the perfect example:

they make you understand that you can't do whatever you want.

Dialogue can get you killed. Pay attention to what you say — some answers will sign your death warrant in one click. You're on a giant prison planet with a secret mission. Talk too much and you're done.

You sometimes have to abide by the rules if you want to stay alive, and it makes you feel that whatever your level, a quick death is always available. Western RPGs rarely have the nerve... That's our Weakness.

The Practical Guide (No Spoilers)

Right — the useful part. Everything below is spoiler-free.

Getting your team together

• The sooner you find your 3 comrades, the better.
• You can do every quest in the starting industrial zone, but once you reach the northern city, put the side quests aside for a while — you have a contact to meet there, and that should be your priority.
• Every new comrade unlocks new missions on the map. There are human missions and monster missions: complete all the human ones to unlock the hunt for your next comrade.
• Once your team is full, then go do the hundred-odd side quests 😉

Character build

• Create your main character with Constitution 10 and take the Bull perk.
• Strength 7 is required for the second-best armour in the game.
• Save your first 3 perk points for the Botanist perk, then take the one granting +10% critical with every weapon.
• Do NOT take the Full T Flak Jacket perk — that armour isn't the strongest and you'll stop using it. Wasted points.
• Raise Melee to 100 and no further, then specialise in Heavy Weapons. Melee carries you through the early levels, but the moment you can buy or find a rifle, do it... Bullseyes with a ranged weapon is better than stabbing!
• Press the AIM, then Numpad 8 to target the head — most rifles run on Heavy Weapons, and that's how you one-shot.
• Shotguns and pistols become completely useless. Don't invest a single point — there are no high-end shotguns, but there are high-end rifles and SMGs, all Heavy Weapons. By the end of the game: You'll dump everything left into Heavy Weapons and Imperial Weapons. You can push past 200 points, and the more the better.
• First Aid to 100, no more. Thieving to 80-90 on your main character to open every chest.
• Don't visit the coaches until all 3 comrades are found! They boost your entire team's stats — if someone's missing, he gets nothing. All of these things you discover by yourself, there is not a soul to teach you anything.

Money, XP and survival

• There's a later quest where you can buy and resell alcohol. With a Trade skill of 150, it profits every single time — Infinite money! And money matters here: a certain doctor later on has very useful skills and very high prices 😉
• Stealing is a great source of XP. Many houses need a special key — usually found in the owner's pocket.
• You can heal your team with food or medkits even while paused. Spam them, your health drops fast.
• Save constantly. You can save anywhere, even mid-battle, and on Hard you'll need to.

The one major bug you need to fix below:

During the quest where you bring some Niagara to Andre, the game will crash during a dialogue. You need to place the media03.bm file in your game folder — and never remove it afterwards, or the game won't start at all.

Two smaller quirks: after killing the 3 traitors as your first Legion task, you'll hit a black screen

— press Enter once, then Escape once, and the cutscene will play. And near the end, when you find Imperial Weapons, don't burn all your ammo on what looks like the final mission. It isn't.

The real last fight is tough (specifically in Hard mode) — keep half your Imperial ammo in reserve!

The Rough Edges (There Are Many)

Let's be honest about what you're getting into.

• The game crashes. Sometimes while saving, which corrupts the save. Save often, and rotate slots.
• Alt-Tab is roughly a coin flip for whether the game survives it.
• The pathfinding is horrible. Your characters are dumb, and NPCs will physically block you.
• The theft script barely works. Apart from four or five specific people, you can rob anyone and open every chest right in front of its owner. Nobody says a word 😄 I don't even remember if there is a sneak ability... would be useless!
• The voice acting is disastrous — laughably so. Between the mangled script and some genuinely bizarre character animations, the English version plays more like a comedy than a grim Russian Fallout.

Levels and progression: there's no hard cap, but pushing past level 48 is brutal — the XP curve explodes, and enemies don't respawn. Once they're dead, they're dead, so you can't grind. Level 50 is effectively impossible. Stealing is your only real source of extra XP past that point... Or maybe if you decide to kill everyone, don't remember if that's possible...

Planet Alcatraz 2: The One That Never Crossed the Border

Like a lot of Russian games, there's a sequel. And it exists only in Russian.

Planet Alcatraz 2 came out in September 2008.

Steam states it plainly: "Only Russian language is supported at the time of Steam release." Eighteen years later, that hasn't changed. Fans have tried to translate it; every attempt eventually stalled until this guy did it with AI!

Its hero is Sergeant Hartman, leader of the Ghoul strike unit — the one who went missing in the first game. And if you know anything about Goblin, that name is a wink: Sergeant Hartman is the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket, exactly the kind of film whose Russian translation made Puchkov's name.

The game even ships with a difficulty setting called "Goblin Mode." 😄

Why was it never localised? My old theory was that the translators took one look at the first game and refused to go through that again. It's a fun story, but it's probably wrong — the first one did get translated, censorship and all.

The likelier answer is simply commercial: Planet Alcatraz didn't sell enough abroad to justify funding a second localisation. Which is a genuine shame, because the sequel sits at 95% positive among Russian players.

So Is It Worth It?

The game costs about 4€ on Steam. For 70 hours of content if you're a completionist — and I was, side quests and every chest — that's not a purchase, that's a rounding error.

It's a real good game. Genuinely. The plot is solid, the world is grim and coherent, the tactical combat holds up, and the dialogue system has real consequences. The shame is what happened to the translation — and the irony of who wrote the source material makes that sting even more.

Would I recommend it to a friend?

Yes — Russian games are good. Buggy, rough, occasionally incomprehensible in English, but full of ideas nobody else was having. Just go in knowing what kind of place you're visiting. 🚬

+ Written by a former detective — the prison world feels real
+ Dialogue with actual lethal consequences
+ 70 hours of content for the price of a coffee
+ Tactical squad combat that still holds up
+ Ideas Western studios simply weren't having in 2006

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- Crashes, corrupted saves, and one quest-breaking bug needing a manual fix
- Pathfinding is genuinely terrible
- The English translation is butchered — accidentally hilarious
- Voice acting is laughable (they must have recorded drunk people 🤣)
- The sequel has never been translated, actualy since 2026 there is!