I’ve never really thought of myself as someone who would enjoy a survival simulation video game. A year or two ago, I found myself in a place where I wanted to find a game to really get into but lazily – if that makes sense, I didn’t want to have to join team chat or actually try to aim or think much. My brother suggested Rimworld to me, but warned that perhaps I should dip my toes into a ‘cuter’ survival simulation game first. Hence, Oxygen Not Included made its way into my steam library. After being released onto Steam in early access the game officially made its debut on July 30th, 2019 and oh boy, it has been a game-changer for me. Taking slight inspiration from SpacePanda’s ‘Comfy Gaming’ series, I’ve found myself realising that Oxygen Not Included is that game for me. It’s my go-to when life gets tough, or in this specific case when Elden Ring bosses make me want to break every controller in the house. It’s a calm, gentle breath of fresh air, with its adorable game style so uniquely done through Klei Entertainment.

Now don’t get me wrong, Oxygen Not Included lights up those tired, unused, thinking brain cells of mine. Hidden behind the cute space theme lies a network of complicated rabbit holes to explore and hopefully conquer. Initially, when loading into your world, you’re met with three naive faces staring back at you looking mildly confused but hopeful that you know what you’re doing. More often than not, you pick a direction and just start digging, starting to think about where everything will go, which rooms are needed first and start to get an idea of the map seed you’ve been loaded into. It feels similar to watching an ant farm form, with your little duplicants digging, building, and spreading off in all sorts of directions. The game makes you consider colony layouts and realise that oxygen is actually a vital gas when wanting to survive. The most surprising thing for me is how attached you get to the little things. Your duplicants each have their own set of personalities, weird habits that can cause discomfort to others, i.e. having no bedrooms built, everyone’s sleeping in the kitchen and Steve over there snores like a freight train.

I would definitely put Oxygen Not Included in the ‘strangest game I’ve ever played yet you can’t stop playing’ category. It becomes obsessive. Even though I have a nasty habit of starting an entirely new colony basically every time I play, I simply always come back to it. It’s a curious sort of comfort, essentially building exactly the same things in the same order. Well, I do anyway. When everything is running semi smoothly I love to sit and just watch the duplicants. Have you ever seen a duplicant so absolutely stressed out from his workload that he suddenly begins incessantly vomiting, while everyone else tries desperately to control the endless flow of it? No? Yeah well me neither… It becomes more and more important to not only create a survivable environment for the duplicants but also keep them happy. To give them little things to find comfort in; a nice warm fluffy bed, maybe with a rocking bedroom to crawl away to at the end of the day.

Keeping all your duplicants alive through a couple of cycles feels like a triumph. Timmy getting stuck on the other side of a wall that was built and slowly suffocating – not so much. Listen, it’s a problem I have in Rimworld and Oxygen Not Included alike, I can be incredibly oblivious. Duplicants lost to the silliest things is no odd occurrence in my world. I’ve seen like six duplicants get crushed while digging out a roof and had to sit back and stare in horror while they slowly die. It’s a pure beautiful game and sometimes I ruin it, okay.

Overall, I believe Oxygen Not Included will always be ‘that’ game for me: The one that I always come slinking back to when I need it. Klei does such an amazing job of keeping it fresh, with unique and strange updates. New items, new research branches to dive into, keeps the game feeling different, and honestly, I have never had a moment where my colonies turned out the exact same.  So is the game worth it? Most definitely yes. It’s a cute little survival simulation that will grasp you from the moment you load in and hey, you frankly never know what will happen.