A sandbox game with survival, resource management, and sim elements.
Oxygen Not Included
This game was made for me. Ever since playing
Serf City I've loved games where you order minions to build things inside a complicated economy.
Oxygen Not Included is the best offering of that type to date. It is clearly inspired by
Don't Starve, Terraria, Sim City, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio.
The Good
Flexibility
A fan of sims can build amazing, beautiful, and elegant houses. You can customize your "dupes" (sims) to some extent. An engineer might be more interested in designing optimal systems. A survivalist might crank up the difficulty and spend the game with ugly, jury-rigged buildings just trying to stay alive. An economist might build an infinitely self-sustaining biosphere.
Scaling Complexity
You can play with just a few dupes and very simple systems. Once you have mastered those systems, you can expand to more complex systems. For example, basic bathroom needs can be met with an outhouse and wash basin. However, this uses up some resources and requires a lot of dupe labor to keep the buildings clean. Once you are ready to tackle indoor plumbing, you can design a bathroom that is completely self contained and requires no maintenance.
Interleaved Systems
There are so many unique systems that must be balanced. Oxygen, water, heat, food, electricity, morale, stress, decoration, and map resources all compete for dupe labor.
For example, let's say you want to add more dupes to your colony. That creates more carbon dioxide. To deal with that, you build a carbon skimmer. This requires electricity and turns fresh water into polluted water. It also generates some heat. You can build a water sieve to clean the polluted water, but that requires electricity and sand. It also makes a bit of heat. Now that you are using a lot of electricity you make a coal generator. It makes electricity but uses coal. It also generates heat and carbon dioxide. So you have gotten your carbon dioxide and electricity balanced but you are using sand and coal, and making heat. There is plenty of sand in the game so that isn't a problem. Coal will last a long time but you might have to make more. To do that you need to raise Hatchlings. But they need a ranch, dupe labor, and you have to feed them.
Often, the game is about balancing short-term solutions and long-term solutions. Food is a good example. You start with some nutrient bars, but they run out quickly. There are also bits of food spread around the map. That's all fine for the short term, but you will eventually starve. Some edible plants grow and can be harvested every few turns. This is fine if you only have a few dupes, although it often prevents efficient building because you have an ear of corn in the middle of your bathroom. To solve this, you need to build farms or ranches, but that takes time and resources.
Emergent Play
One of the best aspects of Oxygen Not Included is coming up with clever solutions to problems. My friends never have problems with pipes, but my pipes break all the time, flooding my base with water. As a result, I design my base such that leaks are easily contained and cleaned.
Sometimes you come across a naturally generated resource. Say your base is both low on water and starting to get too hot. Then you stumble on a steam geyser. You could solve your water shortage by pumping hot water into your base, but that would exacerbate the heat problem. Instead, you come up with a clever building that uses a steam turbine and a water cooler to bring cold water into the base at the cost of much electricity.
Emergent Catastrophes
While not nearly as amusing as Dwarf Fortress, there are plenty of entertaining disasters in Oxygen Not Included. There are no real random events, so all disasters are completely the fault of the player. That makes it so much worse to realize that if you had just been a bit smarter, your dupes would still be alive. In one of my games, I thought I had it made. The basics were on autopilot while I build advanced systems. I didn't realize a heat buildup was slowly overtaking my base. Eventually the crops were too hot to grow and most of my dupes starved. A few survived but they spent weeks too stressed to do anything except sit in the corner and puke. Fortunately, the game gives you a new dupe every few days. Since these dupes are not hungry or stressed, I was able to have them eventually fix my problems.
The Bad
Although it seems like a I have many bad things to say, really I am being nitpicky. I love this game but I personally prefer critical reviews to gushing ones.
Too Much Sandbox
If you only plan to play for a couple hundred hours, there is plenty of game to keep you satisfied. However, the "survival" aspect of Oxygen Not Included isn't very strong. Once you learn how to turn water into food and oxygen, you just need to make sure there is always plenty of water. Even the worst catastrophe usual allows a few dupes to survive. You can combat this by turning up the difficulty or playing on a more difficult map, but it's not the best solution.
Lack of Polish
Most of the UI and gameplay, is great but the first time I launched the game I thought it wasn't finished. A few screens, menus, and buttons look bad.
Bugs
The bugs aren't terrible but there are a few. Sometimes things just don't seem to work right, but if you save and load the game it is fixed. Also, the game isn't always in the same state when you load it as when you saved it. It's minor things, but if you have a really complicated system depending on the wrong "minor thing" you could be in trouble. One annoying bug happens when the game autosaves. The game pauses, but it can pause between a mouse or key press. This can lead to accidental orders. I've had a few nasty orders show up this way. One person reports that he ended up ordering all of his buildings to be destroyed and had to load a save game.
Too Much CPU
Mostly this wasn't a big problem for my system, but when I played one game with a lot of dupes, it showed up quickly. The game starts to slow down. Even worse, it feels like the dupes are personally affected. I mean, when the game is running smoothly dupes will quickly switch from task to task. When the game is running slow, the dupe will sit there for a few seconds while the world is running before deciding what to do. On the forums, some people specifically talk about avoiding certain strategies because they can bog down your CPU.
Conclusion
For me, this was a must-buy. It was a rare full-price purchase and I have no regrets. I'm finally about to call it quits after 750 hours of play. Still, I don't recommend it to anybody. It combines three of my favorite genres, and I personally played it with permadeath / no save scumming to make it feel more roguelike. The minor complaints would prevent me from giving it 10/10 but it's still an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
