I was very lucky to finally pull myself away from this game.
Despite its deceptively simple appearance, Oxygen Not Included is an incredibly complex and distinctive Factorio-like game that can easily consume hundreds of hours of your life - and the playtimes in the reviews certainly seem to confirm that.
I had tried to get into it several times before, but it always felt a little slow and tedious to me, with some survival mechanics thrown in. Then, on my third attempt, something finally clicked. It completely swallowed an entire week of my life, and only now have I managed to break free.
It all starts innocently enough.
You just pump some water around.
Then you notice that you now have polluted water, and apparently you need to do something with it. So you go to the wiki or YouTube, figure out how it works, build a filtration system, and then discover that it does not quite behave the way you expected, so you build something more complicated.
Then you realize your power is being used inefficiently. Back to the wiki. Back to YouTube.
Then different gases start appearing around your colony. You try to come up with your own filtering system, it does not work, so once again you go and learn how it is actually supposed to be done. Eventually you are separating gases into different reservoirs and building extra processing just to make sure nothing gets stuck anywhere.
Then you discover that different plants require different environmental conditions. Back to the wiki again.
Then radiation unlocks.
And that was roughly the point where I realized that this incredibly engaging engineering puzzle was slowly turning into a job.
The worst part is that even after you stop playing, your brain keeps playing for you. You lie there thinking about how you could have routed the pipes better, optimized the power grid, or rebuilt some system in a cleaner and more efficient way.
Is that cool? Absolutely.
Do I have enough time to keep doing it? Unfortunately, no.
My main criticism is that the game explains a huge number of its mechanics only on a very superficial level, and more importantly, it often does not explain how you are actually supposed to use them in practice.
As a result, a significant part of the experience becomes a very entertaining form of external research: read the wiki, watch a video, understand the system, go back into the game, and try to build it yourself.
If you are smart, maybe it all works on the first try.
If you are a dumb grown man like me, it takes a little longer than you would probably like.
At some point I realized that I would also need to rebuild parts of my wiring and properly optimize the power grid, and that was where I finally decided I had had enough for now.
Not because the game became bad, but because I would still like to have enough free time to play other games too.
So in the end, I am a little disappointed that I probably explored only a small fraction of what Oxygen Not Included has to offer, and I doubt I will return to it anytime soon.
I genuinely envy the people who have enough time to fully learn and master this game.
And I would still absolutely recommend giving it a try.
If you enjoyed Factorio, there is a very good chance Oxygen Not Included will completely consume you as well - and it may not let go for a very, very long time.
