Everything is going fine. I’ve got a colony of 12 happy little duplicants, all busy mining and sleeping and building. Whoops, looks like my food system isn’t going to support this many colonists. That’s okay, I’ll just build another patch of farms. Whoops, looks like some of my more elite colonists are becoming depressed by the huge piles of dirt and rock around their beds. That’s okay too, I’ll just mark the sleeping area for sweeping. Whoops, now I’m out of coal for the generators. That’s fine, I’ll just mine deeper into that hot zone. But now I’ve got chlorine gas creeping into the top of the colony, and the bottom of the colony is filling up with carbon dioxide, and all the literal piss and shit collecting near the outhouses is polluting the remaining oxygen. That’s fine, because… Hmm. Which life-threatening disaster should I avert?
Oxygen Not Included is a game by Klei Entertainment, on Steam for $24.99. It’s a…science survival simulator game? I guess? In the game you sort-of control a group of people called “Duplicants,” little artificially-printed goofballs with different skills, likes, and dislikes. They also come with with pretty poor survival skills, pretty incredible cardio skills, a willingness to eat things that are truly disgusting, and a healthy appreciation for tidiness and works of art.
Ostensibly, the game is in figuring out how to let your little group of goofuses survive in an environment that isn’t necessarily hostile, but isn’t convenient, either. Oxygen, contrary to the title, is included, but its also limited. There aren’t actively hostile creatures (that I’ve seen), but the creatures aren’t cooperative, either. Its as though the environment existed before you arrived, and you aren’t adapted to it, and it isn’t adapted to you either. But it doesn’t care about you. Well, it cares a little bit, like how you spawn in a temperate, oxygen-rich environment with a material that just produces free oxygen for you, and some pools of pure water.
But the environment doesn’t have to be hostile, and the game doesn’t throw waves of enemies at you every hour or so. Nothing in the game is presented as your enemy. The enemy is your ambition, your greed, your unbearable, unstoppable need to survive in an environment where you are a stranger. And the trouble is that the game’s resources are mostly finite, which makes you more ambitious, to push outward beyond your relatively safe home, inviting all sorts of instability to come creeping in through your doors, eroding your little systems to the point where there’s no single thing that brings you down, just a number of small symptoms of your hubris.
Maybe this is isn’t revolutionary for a city simulator or management game, but what really brings it home is how real the games systems feel. You don’t have to just plant crops to get food, you have to make sure the plants are growing in the right atmosphere, atmospheric pressure, temperature, light level, fertilizer, and irrigation. Different gases mingle and commingle in the empty spaces, liquids… liquids mostly work in ways you would expect, areas get hot when machines are operating in tight spaces… When you look at the technology tree, its easy to think “Oh, I’ll never need that” but you will absolutely reach a point where you can imagine a use for it.
So many of your achievements in this game sound utterly mundane or tedious when described to a friend. “Yesterday I made a closed loop of water and polluted water, so that I’ll never run out of toilet water, as long as I have sand to purify the water!” But the apathy of the environment means that setting up anything moderately complex feels like a great achievement. It also spurs you towards greater complexity, feeding back into your hubris. Even typing that joke about toilet water made me want to make that a reality. But should I make a separate power grid just for toilets? Or retrofit my old power grid? Do I need more metal for this? I should go play Oxygen Not Included some more.
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