Oxygen Not Included

Oxygen Not Included is a management game where you manage “replicants” who are trying to live as long as possible in this asteroid rock thing they spawn into. Everything is randomized, from the traits of your replicants to the layout of the world.

What eventually made me put this game down was the complexity. Once you figure out one aspect of the game and how to manage it, there’s some other aspect you have to figure out. Over and over again.

At first the game seems pretty free-form but at a certain point you need to optimize a bit and makes everything seem pretty rote. The rooms have to be certain dimensions, the wires and pipes need to work a certain way, etc etc means that everyone’s setup will look pretty similar. There’s surprisingly little variation.

Managing the pipes and wires is probably the most free-form part, but gets tedious and messy pretty quickly. There’s some counter intuitive things, like having to tell your replicants specifically not to eat raw food so they prepare it first.

The aesthetics of the game are this cartoony flash-like style. The replicants are pretty adorable as they go about their various tasks.

I tried out this game but I have no desire to return to it. Too many things frustrated me.