Clearly, someone at Klei Entertainment is a stickler for punishment. Invisible Inc., Don't Starve and Mark of the Ninja all have a touch of the cutesy-cruel to them, in their own special ways, their sweetness or wit spread devilishly thin over some brain-wracking difficulty, and Oxygen Not Included is the same. A case of twee, quippy tone layered over a sprawl of systems that's at once intricate and maddeningly vast, it's a game that's constantly teasing you; constantly luring and lulling just before throwing out another crisis; constantly reminding you that you are, in fact, a bit thick. Clearly I'm a stickler for punishment, too, because I think it's brilliant.
You'll start Oxygen Not Included picking a planet on which to be marooned (a new addition for the game's recent move from early access to full release, which basically serves as a more flavoursome way of tinkering with the game world's settings). After that, you spawn in, underground on some foreign world, with three Duplicates, the name for the little cloned people that form the backbone of your colony, and you're off: survive!
That's about as much onboarding as you get, which again is great if you're up for a proper challenge, but intimidating as anything if you like a gentler start. It makes the discovery of some new best-practise positively thrilling, for the fellow technocrats out there, though it also means bad habits form as you learn on the fly - mining downwards, into air vacuums filled with your own CO2, without even knowing there's an entire overlay for oxygen levels, or constructing an outhouse (one of the few hints you're given early on) without a washbasin, so you think you've been smart but actually everyone is about to die of food poisoning because they didn't wash their hands.
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