Oxygen Not Included: Early Impressions

Having played Oxygen Not Included for more than a few hours (I’ll face it, I’m a bona fide addict), I have a good few thoughts and impressions on the game as it currently stands.

Oxygen Not Included's title screen fittingly captures its premise as a moleman colony sim,
Image captured in-game.

Designed by Klei Entertainment, Oxygen Not Included is an Early Access release, following a similar pattern to Don’t Starve before it. Given the reputation of its developers for its previous Early Access games, one can certainly be forgiven for feeling optimistic about the game’s future direction.

My first impression of the game so far is that it seems to be a fair progression from Don’t Starve in both its gameplay and stylistic choices. The art style is very similar to the previous game; the character models are a little cuter but overall the cartoony, Tim Burton-esque aesthetic makes a welcome comeback. Instead of being a survival game at its core, this time Klei Entertainment have taken on the genre of colony management.

The world generation screen captures the dark humour of the game well. It also makes good use of the 'reticulating splines' tropes made famous by The Sims.
Image captured in-game.

The progression in the gameplay themes of Oxygen Not Included from Don’t Starve is noteworthy; while the former tasked players with overcoming the scarcity of food, this new title instead tasks players with overcoming the scarcity of the very air they breathe. It seems that Klei Entertainment have focused on the formula of looking at the player’s relationship with their most basic needs in extreme environments. The end result of this is that this game makes a fitting thematic followup to the previous title in the series.

The cartoony aesthetic of Oxygen Not Included makes for a fitting followup to Don't Starve.
Image captured in game.

There are many other areas in which this progression is evident. Particularly the sound is of note here, where the Duplicants (the colonists that the player is tasked with to survive) make noises not dissimilar to those uttered by Don’t Starve characters. The music is thematic for the environment but harder to notice than its preceding title, probably a deliberate decision, given that player agency is stepped back to an oversight and management role.

The main gameplay loop of Oxygen Not Included, however, stands on its own as a colony management sim. Still in early access, the gameplay nonetheless seems to work well; it is easy to figure out what the player needs and how to get it. In comparison with its contemporaries, Oxygen Not Included stands out from Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress in its instant accessibility. For better or for worse, one can play Oxygen Not Included right away without consulting an extensive wiki page, though the experience is certainly made better by taking an occasional look at a guide.

The game offers useful suggestions to get started and it is fairly easy to get up and running after just a couple of sessions. Familiar ‘it’s fun to die’ tropes are in full swing in Oxygen Not Included; there are many intriguing situations that can and will happen. One standout moment for me was when a Duplicant was tasked with digging a cave section, only to accidentally dig herself into the other side of an impassable chasm, leading to her untimely death by (stupidity) suffocation.

This is the sad fate of Mi-Ma, a Duplicant who trapped herself on a simple digging job.
Image captured in-game.

Oxygen Not Included’s thematics seems to take the flavouring of Fallout Shelter, with a darkly-humorous take on the grim circumstances faced by its in-game characters. Doomed to a life of underground scavenging, the Duplicants’ facial expressions are downright cheerful and cute. On top of this, many of the item descriptions and character biographies, offer jokey yet deadpan descriptions of a bleak existence.

The character select screen captures perfectly the deadpan, darkly-humorous character biographies featured in the game.
Image captured in-game.

As a colony sim, so far Oxygen Not Included has pulled me in. Its systems may be under development but the game itself is more than playable. With the reputation of Klei Entertainment having already gotten a game past the Early Access period, and the excellence of that previous game evident, this moleman-civilisation simulator gets off to an optimistic start.