izigame.me

This game itches that specific wriggly brainworm that seeks progress and innovation. Depending on the save file, said wriggly brainworm will either be tickled like a kitty cat or fucking obliterated into dust in a nanosecond. All of this is to say that this is a very demanding yet fulfilling game.

Progress is driven by your natural desire to develop a sustainable colony as well as overcome limitations as they arrive or loom over the horizon. This is a blessing and a curse, as some days you’ll REALLY want to make progress but other days you’ll be too mentally drained to bother. There’s so much to learn in this game, I’m still learning after hundreds of hours, so don’t worry about getting overwhelmed when you first begin since we’ve all been there – just stick it through.

Gameplay can be summarised as a detailed colony management simulator where you issue instructions to your inhabitants in an effort to establish a self-sufficient colony, or something close to that. Don’t stress about getting to the lategame, it can get overwhelmingly complicated without tutorials/blueprints – I presume you’ll spend most of your time in the midgame where things begin to get spicy.
Expect to restart/make multiple save files, not because it’s that hard (although it is), but because you’ll find yourself thinking “huh… I could’ve made ‘that’ better if I did ‘this’ which may help increase productivity, commuting and overall efficiency. See, that’s the thing in this game: you can do lots of things, but HOW WELL can you do them? There’s always room for improvement and optimisation with every aspect you come across, from improving heat regulation to reducing the need for manual labour. I really enjoy this aspect of the game, especially as your eye for improvement will stay with you and affect how you plan future projects. Personally, I keep returning to this game whenever I want to impress myself with how well I can optimise and improve my base… before I realise everything has started falling apart – disaster will strike hard, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, you’ll want to be ready.

My only real gripes with this game are how difficult it is to pre-plan builds for construction without your Duplicants trapping/suffocating/entombing themselves in ways you couldn’t imagine as well as the fact that it gets progressively more difficult to replace older builds with improved, newer ones without exhausting time, space and style. Worst part is when you want to replace something critical to the survival of your colony with something better but can’t risk it without building a backup, taking more resources and time. Hence, you’ll want to just start again with the better setup from the get-go to save yourself the trouble, despite the limitations of the earlygame.

Overall ‘ONI’ is great, nigh-infinitely replayable thanks to the huge assortment of asteroids and modifiers and settings, and really challenges you in ways most games can’t – most of your problems are your own fault and you must gather the intelligence to fix them yourself using what you have.
(And if you’re having some trouble, playing with tummyless Duplicants can save yourself some mental anguish. I do it plenty, sometimes you just want less to worry about, although oxygen will ALWAYS be an ever-present looming threat).