Oxygen Not Included

Oh, Oxygen Not Included? Absolutely! If you’ve ever dreamed of managing a team of adorable yet incredibly stupid little space miners who refuse to breathe unless you tell them to, this is the game for you. It’s like playing God, but in space—and you quickly realize you’re terrible at it.

It's a game where you can spend hours creating a perfect little underground colony, only to watch it all go horribly wrong when someone decides to hold their breath and suffocate, or worse, your poor dupes start a fire... in a room filled with oxygen. Genius.

You’ll get to experience the thrill of running around in circles trying to keep your colony alive by building plumbing systems that make absolutely no sense—and then watch as one poor soul tries to use a bathroom made entirely of metal doors while everyone else is breathing in carbon dioxide. It’s a chaotic, stressful, and delightfully hilarious mess.

So if you enjoy intense pressure, management failures, and little characters that will definitely die in creative ways, Oxygen Not Included is the game for you! Just be prepared for the existential crisis of wondering if maybe you are the problem.

Top tier game. Spaced out DLC is also amazing, but the Frozen one seems meh (I played the beta version, so maybe it shaped up better now). I hope they keep expanding the game with great DLC because this is truly a gem of a game. Seems like amazing game developers led by not-so-great marketing advisors at the moment.

Would still rec this game to anyone even if they aren't interested in a factorio-like genre.

I've practically owned this game since release and I don't know what to tell you. From the cute graphics to the awesome sounds, the deep gameplay mechanics to the hilarious situations you can get yourself into, this is probably one of the cornerstones in colony simulation games that was ever made. Not to mention the Klei team has been consistent in providing us with more silly but also genius content over the course of this games lifetime. Having sunk over 500 hours into this amazing gaming I can confidently say throw your money at Klei Studios. 100% will recommend. 10/10.

You'll need to watch a lot of youtube videos to help you as a beginner. At least in my case. But when you get into it this is one of the best games ever made.

I really hated this game at first because it explains almost nothing, but I was determined to figure out. After screwing up literally everything, it all makes sense.. sort of. This is definitely the game I love to hate.

I never thought it was possible to travel through time until I played this game for 10 minutes and suddenly have 13 hours play time

If you like thinking about optimizing everything whether you are playing the game or not, this one is for you.

If you want to have the experience of diving into a fresh new game and trying to figure it out for yourself then this game is NOT for you. This game has so many systems built into it which are designed to waste your time and you are forced to make the decision between wasting hundreds of hours or googling stuff. Now the funny thing is that even when researching for tutorials and stuff you will be even more compelled to quit the game because some of those "tricks" they show you are so complex and ridiculous that I wonder who played this game so much to even figure this out?

This is the opposite of intuitive game design.

Great game.

The only thing I dislike is liquid lock and poor choice of other options to sustain vacuum in rooms. They should add some standard building for that or at least speed up vacuuming using normal gas pump, so we can build proper buffers overself.

I will reconsider the review if developers add such a thing.

Now, steam may say I only have 72 minutes, but it is lying, because I have over 780 Hours on it on Epic Games. This game is amazing and tickles the itch in my head to make really complicated things. I love this game and if you love managing things, or building, or accidentally starving, you will love this game. 10/10

As an engineer and physics teacher, I find it a pleasure to write a review for "Oxygen Not Included." This game has captivated me for over 600 hours, and for good reason. It’s one of those rare titles that can make you lose track of time, often at the expense of a good night’s sleep, thanks to its deep and engaging base-building and management mechanics.

The gameplay and art are top-notch, as expected from the creators of "Don’t Starve." The game’s incorporation of real-world physics, chemistry, and even a hint of biology sets it apart from typical base-building titles. Concepts like denser gases sinking, thermal conductivity of materials, and gas flow mechanics aren’t just visual flourishes—they’re crucial to mastering the game’s systems. I’ve even recommended it to some of my students as a fun way to engage with these scientific ideas in a practical context.

One area that feels like a missed opportunity, however, is the game’s approach to electricity. While it introduces the concept of transformers to manage potential differences, it falls short of incorporating more sophisticated concepts like series and parallel circuits. Given the game’s 2D aesthetic, I believe the addition of more realistic electrical systems could have been a natural and engaging fit for players to experiment with.

Make no mistake, this is a challenging game. Your duplicants (the characters you manage) will suffer and perish in various ways—hunger, heat, and oxygen shortages, to name a few—until you master the balancing act required for survival. Problems often reveal themselves too late, forcing you to start over from scratch. But therein lies the charm of "Oxygen Not Included": every failure is a lesson learned. The experience of rebuilding from scratch, armed with newfound knowledge, makes for an incredibly rewarding gameplay loop.

For those who enjoy base-building games, I wholeheartedly recommend "Oxygen Not Included." It’s not always a smooth ride, and losing a base after dozens of hours can be disheartening, but the lessons learned with each restart make every new base a little smarter and more efficient than the last.

The expansions are promising, though I’ve only scratched the surface of the newer ones. Mods, on the other hand, are a mixed bag. There’s a rich modding community offering everything from quality-of-life improvements to full gameplay overhauls. Personally, I’m a bit of a purist, preferring cosmetic mods over those that make the game easier. The only caveat is that mods often break after updates and require patching to work again.

All in all, "Oxygen Not Included" is a meticulously crafted, mentally stimulating, and sometimes brutally unforgiving game. If you’re up for the challenge, it’s well worth your time—just don’t be surprised if it ends up taking more of it than you expected.

well it's a game where you are tasked not to fuck up like other people just make sure they are alive and that's really the only thing you need to start with

After enjoying Mind over Magic and people suggested I try out this game....
This game is crazy, it's so easy to get into, but insane just how difficult it is to master.
I didn't expect I'd be playing so much.
Great game, 100% recommend.

Oxygen Not Included teaches you one thing: managing space colonies is hard—especially when everyone’s starving, suffocating, and setting things on fire.

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

I've played just a few hours *cough* at this point. At first the game can feel a bit overwhelming with whats being thrown your way. Learn from these challenges and reload if needs be. No shame in starting over or reloading. There are so many videos on youtube for builds or tips. I've had a few files reach 5000-8000 cycles at this point and always find it fun to go back to. It's a really fun game for anyone who likes games in general, however might tickle your fancy more if you're into colony sims, resource management, builders, etc. This one sneakily and in a entertaining way either reminds you of some of the basics science wise or flat out teaches you some if you weren't aware to begin with. I will never stop recommending this game and be excited for anyone about to start their path down their ONI addiction. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

This game is Simply The Best! Engaging and challenging mechanics, great graphics, hilarious dystopic lore, a lively community, and marvelous mods. It’s gotten to a point I almost feel bad for the devs that I haven’t bought any of the DLC. The thing is, the base game is already so rich in content I don’t feel the need for a DLC. I’ve got over 2800 hours on the counter and still haven’t seen the end of it.

If you are into colony building and have a good head for tinkering and resource management, this game is for you.

If you don’t have a good head for tinkering and resource management, you will have fun too. You will just create more havoc. But even the havoc will be wonderful :D. It’s going to be a hell of a ride whichever way you go, and it’s a sandbox, so you can go anywhere you like. To infinity and beyond! The quality of this game cannot be overstated.

Oxygen Not Included isn’t just a game for me—it’s been so much more than that. During one of the darkest, most painful times in my life, it became my escape, my distraction, and honestly, my reason to keep going.

There were days when it felt like I couldn’t handle the weight of everything happening around me, but this game gave me something else to focus on. It’s not just about building or surviving; it’s about creating something out of chaos, and that’s exactly what I needed.

I don’t know where I’d be without it. This game has kept me grounded when everything else felt like it was slipping away. If you’re looking for something challenging, rewarding, and unexpectedly comforting, I can’t recommend Oxygen Not Included enough. For me, it’s not just a game—it’s been a lifeline.

Before buying, you should keep in mind that this game is not so easy as it looks. I would recommend that you be familiar with this type of games before playing. Because, the game requires you to manage a lot of things at the same time. (For example; from keeping the heat in adaquate levels to providing your colony with sustainability.) Even if you have played games like this before, you may have to play a lot of times before finally figure out how things work.
When I played the game for the first time, despite having played games like this, i couldn't get it and had to start over a lot of times which almost brought me to the point of quitting the game and uninstalling it. But this is I think what makes this game good and unique. It has its own challenges.

Now, time to talk about what this game is about. Simply, you're stuck inside an asteroid and try to reach the surface as quickly as possible. However it's not as easy as it looks. You must first discover the inside of the asteroid and expand your colony. I know this is a game review and not a game guide but this game really puts a great emphasis on being sustainable. If you are not sustainable (especially in early-mid game), it's a game over. Also, expanding aggressively and having more people than you can support may not the best thing to do. Simply "the more the merrier" doesn't work here. Which is something that makes this game unique among its kind.

By the way, the game has a sufficient amount of content so you can enjoy it for a long time. You may need 50-100 hours to finish depending on your gameplay. The game has a sandbox mode too.

To sum up, if you love difficulty, colony management, exploration and are ready to assume a lot of responsibility, this game is perfect for you! But you may be frustrated at first due to its complexity but once you get a grasp on it, it will be a very fun game to play.

Additionaly, it is worth the price!

If i were to rate it, i would give it 9/10

There are no raids, there are no major enemies, there is only entropy. This game is extremely complex under the hood. Gas management, temperature, water, etc. Your job is to manage the system and survive.

Entropy is the only enemy.

This game can pull you in like a physical force. You get so hooked by the cutesy graphics, that you wind up spinning far more plates then you realize, from there you will be racing to address one problem after another. Oh, I am running out of Oxygen. Wait, now everything it too hot, and plants aren't growing. This may not be for everyone, but it is very satisfying to dig into the mechanics, and things get quite deep.

This game is worthless and won't respect your time or effort, don't bother. Even if you try to play along and manage with the problems the physics are so inconsistent and change both on a case-by-case scenario and also depending on how long you've played as lag drastically effects heat transfer.

Your math won't matter, extra effort won't matter, the challenges aren't fun they're just frustrating and the solutions are repetitive and boring; the only actual challenge you'll have is fighting the lack of manual control, the terrible priority, and the flawed code. You'll lose items, you'll lose time, your designs won't work- you cannot fix or prevent this because the game is so poorly made. Just like Don't Starve, I love the art and the vision, the execution is insulting.

I want to love these games, they're just not made well enough to be satisfying or rewarding. I want to play this game, I want to enjoy it, I cannot.

Errands priorities breaks all the time. Your dupes will randomly decide they don't want to work when they should be working. They are worse than commies

This is head to head with Rimworld for my most played games.

It's a colony sim, but there's no external forces attacking you, you just have to survive in a harsh environment and build a nice home for your Dupes. This is very relaxing. Until you run out of essential resources needed for food or oxygen. Or you have to deal with a steam explosion. Or everything just melts. Or one of your idiots managed to trap themselves behind a wall they just built and suffocates. Or a combination thereof.

The art style and the animations are just lovely, especially the critters.

Klei regularly releases updates containing bug fixes, some new content and quality of life stuff. And right now, the third DLC is in the beta testing phase. The first DLC "Spaced Out!" adds quite a different endgame experience to the game, with many new mechanics. The second DLC "Frozen Planet Pack" is more like a new frozen environment, not actually changing the gameplay mechanics too much, but introducing a few new frozen biomes and critters.

I am in love with this game. help me, I cant stop playing, yesterday I started playing right after I woke up then the next thing i saw is, its already midnight. great game

Good game, with even better community.
e.g. take a look at my workshop items (iyi)

It's an interesting base building/survival game, just like Dwarf Fortress in space. Except these dupes don't die as easily as dwarves.
Gameplay is nice, and easy to navigate around. Fonts though are a bit small, so it is a bit tough to read it properly.

Can be complicated to learn, but a great base builder with lots of mechanisms

This is my highest played game by far (currently at 888 hours). If you enjoy trying to figure out different ways to craft complex systems, this might be your game. Then there is the fun of trying to remove that one tile of CO2 that a dupe put into your perfectly vacuumed out room you thought was protected by an atmo suit.

This game is so incredibly adorable as well as supremely complex. having to deal with pressure, heat and oxygen is hard but so gratifying to get right. I have loved refining my base layouts so that my dupes can live their best lives!

Not gonna lie, I only played this game because it was free at one point. Before I knew it, 7 hours went by. I bought the game. I love this game. The height in depth to this game really has me in a choke hold. Going into Automation made me doubtful but once i got some pointers from youtube I was set.

Attempt 1. Goes well until food becomes scarce. Everyone dies. Attempt 2. Everyone is well fed but focused too much on digging and not enough on oxygen, everyone dies again. Attempt 3. Made it over 80 cycles then realized all my crops are too hot to keep growing, everyone starves quickly because all nearby creatures died of old age. Attempt 4. All their needs are met but they could not be protected from their own stupidity. One guy decides to sleep in the magma level, starts dying. Another guy goes to retrieve the dying one, also starts dying, and that continues until everyone is dead. Lesson learned, don't walk away without pausing. Attempt 5. Made it over 100 cycles and no one dies but everyone experiences blackouts due to my inability to manage an actual surviving colony until now.

its a base building game with focus on survival. the greatest challenge is how to manage resources with oxygen being one of the things that will kill everyone if managed poorly. the game starts easy but gets exponentially hard as resources are consumed and you need to find ways to replace them.

A brilliant survival game that I would recommend to anyone, I still don't know half of the mechanics after many hours of playing.

The game excels in its depth and complexity, offering endless challenges in maintaining equilibrium across systems like temperature, plumbing, and power. The charming art style and clever duplicant personalities bring humor and life to even the most dire situations. With its steep learning curve, it rewards experimentation and creative problem-solving.

great game with small entry barrier of requiring a phd in engineering, physics and chemistry

A game that makes you feel really smart and really dumb at the same time.

It deserves all the love it gets. It's the only colony sim game that has so much depth paired with cute graphics. Absolutely worth the price for the endless replayability it offers. Plus, the devs keep coming back to add more free content since 2019, so there's new ways to play the game every year.

the game mixes fun with constantly being paranoid about your dupe's stress and honestly its kinda fun

A great base building game that is actually supported by the developer. Just remember that dupes are not smart and the physics of the game sometimes contradicts the real world 😉

Amazingly addictive. Definitely play two or three games too at least turn 100 before looking up tutorials on Youtube. It will give you more satisfaction as you progress. Don't feel the need to take a dupe every time you have the choice. Sometimes food and resources are a better choice!

The game fits nicely into a specific niche of players who like complicated technology trees where every single building and upgrade is linked to another building or upgrade and affects the entire flow of your space colony. This is its greatest strength.

That said, it is also its greatest weakness. Playing the game is an exercise in how much you can memorize said technology tree. Once you feel like you've got a decent understanding of your current buildings, some unknown factor that you haven't studied or encountered is going to cause problems. While that seems exciting and makes the game seem more fun, it only makes it so that you have to study the game more. And yes, by study I mean STUDY. Which goes where? What does this thing do? How can I do X, Y, and Z?

Oh, and there's no tutorial other than small and lengthy walls of text filled with names and numbers that only increase the mental struggle rather than ease it.

If you thought Civilization had a steep learning curve, Oxygen Not Included is ten times steeper. After taking my time learning about 15% of the game's different rules and buildings and noticing I had quite a long way to go before I get a good grasp of the mechanics, I finally decided to call it quits. I play games to take a break from work, and Oxygen Not Included was beginning to feel like work after several hours.

Bought and refunded after an hour. I wanted to enjoy this game but the immediate realization of the HUGE amount of information presented right at the start was too overwhelming. I don't have an engineer brain and don't see myself spending hours learning before having fun. The game doesn't clearly explain how to do some things and you have to look up a lot of tutorials.

Great colony sim, endearing art style. You can make it as simple or complex as you want with plenty of mods, settings and guides ( I do recommend going in blind at first though).

I played thousand of games and this is one of the best i´ve ever played.
I could write a book about the positive aspects of the game.
Thank you very much Klei for the 1000+ hours. Hope you will release more DLC´s for ONI in the future and
please add more / different / random generated Asteroids that can be visited with spaceships/teleporter to the game!

pretty good game i love it ,i'd be honest it get complicated with time but if there's o challenges it's no fun may possibility and responsiblity to take care of it's amazing

Love it! I admit it is challenging to make sure you don't drown, starve, or suffocate your little peeps but bless their sweet hearts. Had to buy the full version of it after 20 binge hours of game play! 3 am came way to quick when you are busy avoiding toxic gas and starvation. Although mud nutrient bars how sad......

Oxygen Not Included is great game.

Oxygen Not Included has much more science and complicated mechanics than most other games do. When playing, you often end up having to make many calculations and it's a good workout for the brain. But it's also really fun at the same time.

However, my favorite thing about it is the duplicants. They talk to each other and react to the things around them, and each have their own names and personalities. It's interesting that besides just giving them food and More.

Love it and still going strong with all the new content.

good:

* Well woven together game mechanics with a lot of interactive depth
* Visuals that manage to be both easy to read when you're playing and aesthetically pleasing if you take a step back
* Regular updates with consistently high quality

bad:

* somewhat of a steep learning curve, with aspects that aren't intuitive and you'll have to look up online to understand
* some mechanics are very easy to cheat at once you realize it's possible (like deleting heat by pumping high-heat oxygen into an electrolyzer) , and you have to deliberately ignore some of those easy cheats if you want the game to be fun

There is a robust modding community, but unfortunately, the developer, Klei, has no respect for the modding community nor players who enjoy playing with mods. Each update completely breaks mods, and even rolling back to a previous version entails multiple hours of attempting to enable mods one at a time. As with most games that utilize mods, it is the mods and the developers of mods that enhance the base game. Klei seems intent on forcing players to play the game the way the envision, and thus, seem to purposefully inject code in the updates that will break and disable mods.
If you are a player that never plays with mods, then you'll enjoy the base game and the multiple DLCs, which will cost you additional purchases.
If you are a player that enjoys mods, don't waste your money or time, as you'll be continually frustrated at the shenanigans of the a$$hole developers.

This game is like the Dark Souls of The Sims franchise.

It’s far from easy—there are countless mechanics to grasp before you can truly progress. However, once you’ve mastered the complexities and overcome the challenging situations, the sense of accomplishment is incredibly rewarding, and the fun really begins.

A truly outstanding game!

I love games that make me find new solutions to on-going issues. There are multiple ways to fix the systems in this game and out of all the colony sims ive played this one has to be the best.

It is a fun game to explore,build, and dig. There are many intresting critters and mechanics that other games do not have like being able to control how many animals you have and getting free stuff that you want in the portal and controlling what your duplicants do. Oxygen NOT Included is a really fun game ( :