Oxygen Not Included

After investing some time into this game, I suppose I have no choice but to say I like it.

Don't let the cute art style and the daft little dupes fool you. This isn't a chill builder, it's a thermodynamics PhD wearing a colony sim as a disguise. The title's a bit of a joke really, oxygen is the least of your worries once you're knee deep in heat management, gas distribution and a pipe network that's turned into spaghetti. What Klei have nailed is consistency. Gases, liquids, heat, power and automation all run on rules that stay the same no matter how chaotic the colony gets, so when something breaks it's always your fault, never the game cheating you. That's what makes solving it so satisfying. The first time a Self-Powered Oxygen Machine stabilises your whole base you feel like an actual engineer. It's deep. Properly deep. You're juggling temperature, oxygen, hunger, stress and comfort all at once, and every fix spawns three new problems. The flip side is the learning curve. The in-game teaching is thin, so expect to lose a few colonies before it clicks, and some folk bounce off it for that exact reason. Verdict: If you like colony builders with real systems mastery rather than hand-holding, this is one of the best around. Sitting at 97/100 across 135,000+ Steam reviews for good reason. 9/10, would suffocate my dupes again.

A Masterpiece of Controlled Chaos and Thermodynamics The Good Unmatched Engineering Depth: This isn't just a survival game; it's a simulation of physics, gasses, liquids, and thermodynamics. You will design functional plumbing, automated power grids, and complex gas filtering systems. Adorably Dumb Colony Members: Your "Duplicants" are full of personality. They stress-vomit, cry, binge-eat, and perform hilarious animations, making you genuinely care about keeping them alive. Infinite Replayability: No two asteroids are the same. Procedural generation combined with various biomes, geysers, and space destinations ensures every playthrough offers a unique engineering puzzle. Rewarding Automation: Hooking up logic gates, sensors, and shipping rails to make a fully automated, self-sustaining base feels like an incredible achievement. The Spaced Out! DLC: The expansion seamlessly integrates rocketry and multi-asteroid management, effectively doubling the game's complexity and scope. The Bad The Lethal "Noob" Traps: The game hides its deadliest threats. Your base might look fine on Cycle 50, but silent killers like trapped heat, carbon dioxide buildup, or running out of algae will slowly destroy your colony 30 cycles later. FPS Death (Endgame Performance): Once your base spans the entire map with thousands of pipes, wires, and pathfinding calculations, the game's frame rate can drop significantly on mid-range PCs. Verdict: 11 / 10 Oxygen Not Included is a phenomenal, brutally challenging colony simulator that demands your full attention. It rewards logic, planning, and problem-solving like no other game on the market. If you enjoy games like Factorio or RimWorld, buy this immediately—just prepare to keep a calculator next to your keyboard.