Oxygen Not Included: Not As Simple As Breathing

These pictures highlight my ineptitude.

Time Played: 16.5 Hours

 I became a fan of Klei Entertainment when I played Mark of the Ninja in 2012. Unfortunately, Don't Starve didn't alleviate my hunger, and Invisible, Inc. couldn't hide its faults. But I still want to breathe the atmosphere of a great game, so I bought Oxygen Not Included.

Oxygen Not Included looked like a mashup between Don't Starve and Dwarf Fortress. A survival game requiring the players to build a base, but filled with living characters complete with personalities. After 16.5 hours my exploration concludes ONI contains an abundance of the former and very little of the latter.

The player chooses from a list of randomly generated asteroids for their base. By error, which highlights the personality of the game and the ineptitude of the characters, the base is at the core of the asteroid, instead of on its surface. This is the aesthetic of Oxygen Not Included; the people are idiotically incompetent. This theme contrasts sharply, and I would argue, belies the absurd level of skill required to play this game.

The player chooses three starting people from a list. Each character comes with a positive trait and a negative trait. These barely influence their performance. Nor do they reflect their personality. Traits are mere mechanics that occasionally impact the game for better or worse. These three, and I use this term loosely, characters, appear in the center of their asteroid at the misplaced Printing Pod. The Pod prints a new Duplicate (the actual title for the persons), every few cycles (days). The goal: with only three Duplicates and a Pod (and the resources in the asteroid), build a spaceship to escape. This sounds like a charming little task. It even, initially, seems possible to complete within a dozen hours. There are two reasons to think so.

One, the menu offers nine possible asteroids. And each of those asteroids can be played numerous times since they are templates for randomly generated areas. The breadth of possibilities would imply the ability to play a few, if not all. Second, the characterization. The Duplicates of Oxygen Not Included retain a similar feel to Don't Starve. Not creepy in a horror way, but creepy in a goofy, idiotic, and bumbling manner. This evidence indicates a silly tone, and a correspondingly personality driven game, with a not too difficult mechanical system.

Even the video tutorials agree. These short, humorous videos illustrate the absurdity of the Duplicates; their inability to grasp the nature of their surroundings. The quirky videos entertain and inform the player. But for some reason (maybe I turned them off?), they are too few in number. Also, they explain the basics, but don't provide for any intermediate problem solving, or truly integrated complex operations. In short, Oxygen Not Included fails to teach new players.

The player begins with three Duplicates, Set them to work immediately, digging, collecting resources, and building a basic habitat. Build a living space that expands to sustain an ever increasing population. Keep exploring for new resources and threats. The Duplicates aren't too agile. The game is displayed as a grid. Duplicates can jump over one empty space, climb up two spaces, but they don't crawl and need a hallway at least two spaces high to walk through. They don't sink, but walk along the bottom of any flooded areas.

The comet is packed with a variety of different materials. Oxygen Not Included revolves around controlling three resources; liquids, gases, and the soil. The air is composed of six common gases, with fourteen additional rare vapors. The air is depicted beautifully, with faint whorls of color. Gases mix and permeate their environment. Some rise and some sink. Like humans, the Duplicates need clear oxygen. The player needs to produce enough for their duplicates to survive. At any point the player can hover their mouse over a point and it will display how much of each gas is in the area.

Liquids are not as common, but their management is nearly as important, especially water. The crucial, and exhausting, work is to keep water clean. Pollution causes sickness. Water is also used to move heat, dissipating it. Other liquids, like wastewater, need to be controlled, filtered, and reused.

The building blocks of all construction is the terrain. Duplicates dig the ground, turning it into its composite material. This can be used to build everything from beds, to bathrooms to space suits. Each construction requires the correct materials. Like air, hovering over terrain reveals its composition.

These physical elements of Oxygen Not Included are beautiful in their rendering. Like the characters they are cute, goofy, and colorful. The elements are also clear and practical for game play. Oxygen Not Included excels at visual effects..

An expansive base needs to organize the resources of the environment while regulating a livable space for the Duplicates. This requires the use of three systems; electrical, gas vents, and liquid pipes. Tutorials point out the basic elements, but these videos don't explain enough. Every system, in itself, isn't too difficult, but combining all three creates exponential complications. Imagine the management of electricity to supply the pumping of vents and pipes, while the production of electricity pollutes the air with carbon dioxide, or the continuous need to feed resources into the machine, or the generation of heat which threatens lives and the machines themselves, or the overloading of wires with too much energy traveling along them. All these problems are difficult, but become laborious when combined with each other. The complexity explodes as the player's base expands. It isn't that I dislike the systems, but that I had a fundamentally different idea of what Oxygen Not Included was when I started.

Oxygen Not Included looks like a game of personality, but instead is one of mechanics, of engineering. Its silly visuals shroud its strict and serious nature. The characters have no personality, they are soulless machines. The game has the veneer of personality, but no essence.

On the other hand, it is surprisingly difficult to lose. Oxygen Not Included doesn't inflict random catastrophes on the player. It's too difficult to sabotage one's own base. There is no fire (though objects can become super hot), so hydrogen gas doesn't explode. As long as the Printing Pod exists, it will continue to create new Duplicates (and I'm not sure it can be destroyed). The Duplicates succumb to bad gases, extreme temperatures, a lack of food or water, and illness, but they are remarkably resistant. Halting the production of oxygen would kill them, but wouldn't end the game.

In Conclusion, Oxygen Not Included is a beautiful looking game that hides the difficulty of its mechanics. It doesn't have the personality it appears to have. While ingenious in its technical aspect, I found it disappointingly tough to play. Completing a single asteroid would take dozens of hours as I figured out each of dozens of problems, trying to connect all the systems and marshal the necessary resources. I don't want to spend twenty or thirty hours to learn the game. Then I'd have to start a new asteroid from scratch with everything I'd learned.

Yet, writing this review, I think this is what the developer intended. Each problem is a learning process. Learning is the game-play. And I can see the appeal. I nearly want to play Oxygen Not Included again, but then I think about managing the electrical grid, the process of melting metals and making them into products, and the endless exercise in food production. I'm as exhausted as those Duplicates I forced to produce energy by riding Manual Generators (bike/hamster wheel).

Human Resource Machine proved I didn't have the skills to be a computer programmer (or at least that I needed significant training). Oxygen Not Included shows why I shouldn't be an engineer.

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