Overview
Oxygen Not Included is a survival-focused colony sim where you have to try and help a bunch of hapless fools called dupes (short for duplicates) survive in a pretty unforgiving environment inside different planetoids.
The biggest thing that separates Oxygen Not Included from other games of the genre is its focus on real-world science and physics, or what I assume is a pretty close video game equivalent because what the heck do I know about any of that?
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
What I do know is you have to build complex networks of pipes, ventilation shafts, and power grids to manage the various liquids, gases, and power distribution throughout your colony. Since the colony is inside a closed environment, everything is either being consumed, like Oxygen, or it’s sticking around. Duplicates breathe out Carbon Dioxide which, alongside every other gas in the game, doesn’t simply vanish, it has to be dealt with.
It’s a game of resource and time management but in an ever-rotating cylindrical process of consuming, recycling, and problem-solving. But the incredibly complex simulation isn’t what truly sold me on the game. It’s the clever way Oxygen Not Included uses those simulations to constantly give you a challenge or a problem to tackle, keeping you engaged for the entirety of each playthrough, without using external threats to do it.
| Gideon’s Bias | Oxygen Not Included Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Klei Entertainment |
| Hours Played: 50+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: PC | Platforms: PC |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Survival Colony Sim |
| Mode Played: Survival | Price: $24.99 |
Additional Bias: I reviewed the game with all existing DLC.
The Builder Game Problem
I have a problem with most city builders, park builders, or whatever builder games. Most of them tend to be digital toys, rather than games. You can set up a pretty Theme Park, a Mars Colony, or a tidy Hospital, but there’s not actually much “game” there. You plop down some buildings, money starts rolling in, and it never stops. The only thing you have to do is wait until the numbers tick up enough to buy your next structure and repeat for the rest of the game.
Without external factors or dynamic events to force you to adapt, the entire process becomes routine. You spend more time making things look pretty than doing any meaningful building or managing.
Some builder games, primarily colony sims, tackle this issue by adding external pressure.
For example, Rimworld, one of the very best games that money can buy, has you managing all of the usual things like food, but constantly throws a wrench into your plans by using external events. It sends raiders to attack you, mutant insects to burrow inside your colony, storms, crop blights, and a bunch more. These events force you to adapt. They throw rocks into the grinding gears of your well-oiled machine and force you to manage the effects that these situations have on your colony to survive.
The thing is Oxygen Not Included doesn’t do any of that. It’s every bit as passive as the games I just criticized. Yet, it constantly compounds your colony with problems through the use of two clever and interlocking mechanisms, scarcity and a ripple effect.
For Every Action, a Reaction
Oxygen Not Included makes itself challenging by introducing scarcity. Resources, liquids, and gases, that run out. This means you have to constantly try and acquire more or recycle what you have. However, this challenge is amplified by making everything you do have a ripple effect, sometimes hours later. Each action you take to make your colony sustainable, adds a new problem to solve.
For example, when you first start a colony, you are surrounded by diggable resources and have a few day’s worth of food and oxygen. As it stands, you could do nothing and your dupes will live for a few days.
However, your Dupes have to go to the bathroom. Without a place to relieve themselves, they will go on the ground, spreading polluted water everywhere. So you build some outhouses, simple right?
Outhouses need dirt, and that dirt becomes polluted which will spread germs. So you will need to find a way to deal with that. However, your Dupes also spread germs if they can’t wash up, so you build a Washbasin. Washbasins need water, so you need to solve that, but they also create polluted water, so you have to make a dumping area for it.
That dumping area spreads germs, so you might want to close it off. But to get sealed doors you need a research table, which requires power. You use manual generators for a while, but when you need Oxygen Pumps and other electrical devices, the power strain gets rough and it takes too much time for your dupes to power them manually. So you make coal generators. Coal Generators release a bunch of Carbon Dioxide, and there is limited space for gases in a closed environment. Carbon Dioxide is heavy though, so you dig downwards and let it sink.
That’s only a temporary solution, however, because it’s still gonna build up over time. So you build a machine that can siphon Carbon Dioxide from the air, but that machine uses water. Now you’re running out of water. You get the idea.
Every action you take causes a reaction in the game. Solving a problem is always two steps forward, and one step backward. Furthermore, these problems can be solved in a myriad of ways, so you always have options, but they always come with a new problem to solve.
One time I was having trouble getting clean water. So I used a machine that heats water to kill the bacteria in my reserve of polluted water. However, pumping that hot water through my pipelines, Increased the temperature of my entire colony and it became too hot for the plants I was using for food to grow.
Oxygen Not Included avoids the pitfalls of the more passive builder-style games, but without using external threats. You don’t get raided, and bad things don’t randomly happen to you. It’s all cause and effect, and your decisions are the cause. At the same time, you have to make those decisions because you will run out of Oxygen and food if you don’t.
It’s incredibly brilliant because, in a way, the game makes you your own enemy. You have to problem-solve and then solve more problems that stem from the decisions you made to solve the previous problems in the first place.
Complexity Within Complexity
I’ve only really scratched the surface of the game and I can only really talk about its surface level, frankly because that’s all I understand. I’m perfectly capable of playing, I know how to siphon one gas and filter it, how to split liquids, and all the basics I need to problem solve. But the game goes far deeper than that. I tried to read a guide once, and I couldn’t understand anything that was being said in the guide, it was like reading another language.
Materials have melting points, gases have different weights and each one has a temperature point where they change states. Managing a colony requires careful and clever layout designs to minimize travel times for your dupes, alongside power grids on separate circuits and complex pipe and ventilation systems. There’s a whole tree of automation tech that I have never used, simply because I haven’t learned how to yet.
This complexity isn’t a bad thing, quite the opposite actually. The complexity of Oxygen Not Included facilitates all the options you actually have at your disposal, and you can often use its systems in unintended ways, or at least ways that feel unintended. It helps keep the game fresh as there are always interesting new things to learn that can make your colonies more efficient, even if you have the basics down enough to keep your dupes alive for a while.
The sheer scale of its simulation systems can be incredibly intimidating, but tinkering with it feels very rewarding in a way that a lot of modern games don’t. Oxygen Not Included doesn’t hold your hand, so when you find solutions to your problems all on your own, there are these really enjoyable moments of going “Aha! So That’s how that works!” and then you get to put that knowledge, your knowledge to good use.
Verdict
I wouldn’t want every colony sim to be like Oxygen Not Included. I think external factors, be it weather events, raids or other challenges are the real key to making a builder-style game interesting. At the same time, I wouldn’t want Oxygen Not Included to have those external events, because not having them is what makes it so special. Oxygen Not Included tackles the issue in its own unique way and it’s brilliant.
Its multidimensional systems make the act of managing the various aspects of the colony interesting and fun. If I have one complaint, it’s the Duplicates themselves. They have their own skills and quirks to manage, but not true personalities of their own.
I don’t really care about them, individually at least. They are just more cogs in my machine, albeit a machine that exists to keep them alive in the first place, but I don’t care when an individual dies, as long as the colony is intact. That personal disassociation with the colonists is the game’s weaker point. Compared to when I lose a colonist in Rimworld, I’m in shambles and questioning the universe.
Regardless Oxygen Not Included has some of the most unique and clever gameplay designs I have ever seen. There are very few games where you could put a degree in various sciences to work, but fewer still, are the number of games that could use them and remain playable and fun for those without them. I’m pretty sure that Oxygen Not Included manages to be both, and that’s incredibly impressive.
