The Best of Early Access Our favorite not-yet-finished games
Oxygen Not In cluded hides a challenging chemistry class.
It’s remarkably easy to grasp the basics of colony management
The best sim games don’t just make it satisfying to succeed, but also make it fun to fail, and Oxygen Not Included, from Don’t Starve developer Klei Entertainment, does both extremely well. Deep within an asteroid hurtling through space, you activate a 3D printer and give birth to a handful of living Duplicants: cloned workers you’ll use to carve the interior of the space rock into a functioning colony. Your Dupes will dig tunnels, carve out chambers, build structures, and assemble machines to extract clean water, oxygen, and other resources from the asteroid. Soon your colony will be humming along, but it won’t take long before you wish your Dupes were robots instead of human clones. There’s no bigger wrench you can throw into a smoothly running machine than a human being, even a cloned one.
See, your Dupes are individuals with needs: Not only do they require sleep, food, and clean air, they also need a degree of comfort and happiness or they’ll get stressed out. Something as simple as a water leak in a corridor making their socks soggy can put a strain on their moods. A Duplicant in a bad mood won’t work as efficiently, and when the Dupes begin to break down, so does everything else. It’s all adorable to witness—Klei’s wonderful art and animations can clue you into a Dupe’s mood with a simple glance—but these cute little tantrums can be the downfall of your colony. More than once I’ve had a Dupe not only refuse to work, but begin running around smashing things in a rage. Things like the machinery keeping everyone alive.
As you learn to manage your Dupes and keep them happy enough to not actively sabotage your colony, you’ll also learn more about the complexity beneath the charming surface of the sim. This isn’t just a matter of setting up an oxygen diffuser and filling a chamber with air. Other gases are present in the rock: Carbon dioxide, chlorine, natural gas, helium, phosphorous, and others, each with their own properties and density, which determine how they spread through an area. There’s a wicked learning curve in Oxygen Not Included— it can start to feel like a chemistry class and plumbing apprenticeship rolled into one—but the failure of your colony arms you with some new knowledge that helps make your next attempt stronger.
Deep impact
You can even take your colony to the surface of the asteroid, where you’ll meet new challenges like meteor showers (which, on the plus side, can provide you with resources even as it destroys your hard work and kills some of your Dupes). The wonderful thing about Oxygen Not Included is that it’s easy to grasp the basics of colony management. But it’s wonderfully complex as well, with lots of depth to its many systems. And, as with any great management game, whether your colony thrives and succeeds or crashes and burns, it’s a pleasure to watch unfold.