RAD That’s true, and I did like taking care for the dupes, since if they can’t get their needs met, they start to get stressed, and that is not pretty. But I wasn’t brave enough to walk away and make a sandwich without pausing this one! Often in sim games there’s no real stakes, you can just leave them running and nothing bad will really happen. WILL Yeah, but I kinda liked that - not the suffocating - but that fact that you have to plan everything carefully. And if you’re not paying attention, before you know it, bam, they’ve suffocated. If there’s even the slightest possibility for them to get stuck somewhere, they seem to find it. RAD The dupes can be a little frustrating though. There’s an awesome sense of discovery that keeps you wanting to dig just a little further!
Once you build environment suits you can start to send them out deeper and deeper into more dangerous areas where you’ll find geysers that spew out precious materials, little mysterious bases, and you can even crack through the surface into space. WILL One of my favourite things was once I got to the point where my dupes can start to really explore the asteroid. From a working sewage and water recycling operation, to fully ducted air conditioning… a big base becomes this huge house of cards of interconnected systems which feels like it’s one small disaster away from all coming crashing down.
RAD And overcoming those challenges feels genuinely rewarding, because often you have to build all these intricate moving systems. WILL And there’s no shortage of problems to deal with they are thrown at you constantly! Just when you’ve got your food supply sorted, you realise you’re running out of water, or your base is slowly filling with deadly gas, or starting to overheat and cook, you can never get complacent! As it is, I was often just left wondering what I should be doing or how things work… but thankfully this has built a healthy online community, with no shortage of videos and guides out there that have some truly genius solutions to problems!
RAD Yeah, especially for some of the more advanced mechanics. Some more detailed tutorials or example worlds or something would’ve been helpful!
WILL There are plenty of little tips and hints that pop up, but it’s hard to know how everything works until you see it all in action. New players are just dropped in and left to figure everything out themselves! RAD Yeah, so there’s quite a steep learning curve, and it doesn’t do the best job of teaching you the basics. Every breath turns oxygen into carbon dioxide, bodies and machines output heat, germs and diseases can be spread without proper hygiene… always wash your hands! Just about everything you can imagine is tracked and measured! WILL And beneath those cutesy graphics, there’s an insanely detailed simulation going on. In between they need to look after themselves by eating, sleeping, and of course using the bathroom. RAD You have no direct control over anything, instead you lay out blueprints of what you’d like to get done, such as digging or building, and your dupes will get around to it when they can. Then you pick your starting crew of three “duplicants” or “dupes”, and the rest is about building a colony that can survive! WILL To start off, you just take your pick of randomly generated worlds based on one of a few different asteroid types, which have different environments that set the difficulty. Putting me in charge of a space colony is a bad idea! WILL You’ll need plenty of those survival skills here too, because as the name suggests, just having enough Oxygen is a constant struggle. RAD We all know getting to another planet ca be hard, but Oxygen Not Included shows us just how hard staying there can be by putting you in charge of running your own space colony! And it comes from the studio behind the excellent survival series, Don’t Starve… and when I came back, there was sewage and water everywhere! Oxygen Not Included Dev: Klei Entertainment Pub: Klei Entertainment Rating: Not Rated Platform: PC, Mac, Linux