During my play through of Koudelka, I was also in the midst of working on a script for a massive Silent Hill 2 project. It was there that I wrote that Silent Hill 2 was the only game I had played that truly understood the prison industrial system as an incoherent, religious nightmare.

I guess that I have to change that.

Koudelka understands prison. It understands being trapped. By religion, by your own past. Whether you're a literal inmate, tortured to death for things that you could not be faulted for, or a traveler who has been excommunicated from her community due to the bizarre circumstances of her birth. Prisons of expectations, prisons of ideology, prisons of the faith.

Punitive justice has its roots in the faith. Christianity loves to punish, the idea that there is an enemy to be punished - even if it also believes anyone can also be forgiven, that is far less emphasized. Judgment. Brimstone. Mortar.

The monastery of Koudelka is revealed fairly early on in the narrative to be a place where many were tortured to death, often for no meaningful crime, only that they needed to disappear. A betrothed woman who the man ultimately didn't marry. A child who was born of an affair. These things needed to be "erased" from the record in the most brutal way possible. After all, they didn't fit the church's idea of the world.

Each character, too, is trapped in their own prison. Koudelka is haunted by her past and present, an outcast who, while extremely helpful and goodhearted, is rejected by all in society. Edward has no purpose, a listless man adrift in a sea of ideas. James, of course, is also trapped within his faith - but also his devotion to his lost lenore, a woman who died in a horrible accident several years ago.

There is a prison for all of us, but there's always a way out.