Picked this up out of desperation for something new to play. I avoided it for a long time because it looked like a Rimworld style building game but vertical (instead of top-down) and even more cartoonish graphics. But the "overwhelmingly positive" reviews (both recent and total) made me give it a go.
tl;dr:
You really want Redstone Wire type systems from Minecraft combined with a colony management game like Rimworld.
Rimworld is a colony management game that's basically about understanding the risks, building defensively against those risks and then eventually getting fucked by the RNG nature of the gameplay. Once you know how to mitigate risks, you're unlikely to die from, say, a sudden attack by murderous muffalo, or a heat wave, but the RNG system can still wear down even the best of players and it becomes a war of attrition where at the harder difficulties, attrition will eventually win. (Many of my Rimworld games just become "not fun anymore" enough that eventually I abandon them and restart because trying to recover from some 8th-in-a-row RNG disaster is possible but tiresome.)
Oxygen Not Included is a very different game and seems (24 hours in) largely built around the idea of "slow, endless pressure" and "the need for automation". There is no real combat that I've seen so far (though maybe that just comes later, I know there are entire stages of the game I've not reached yet), but I think the actual game mechanics have more depth than Rimworld and that's really what Oxygen Not Included is about: growing and managing some fundamentals that slowly get more complex, wide-spread and difficult to manage by hand.
For example, you need oxygen. You can generate oxygen with algae. You can dig and get algae but eventually you're going to run out and you start getting more "slime" instead. There is a process to convert slime to algae. Eventually you're going to run out of slime. You can also turn water into oxygen and hydrogen, which takes energy. Where does your energy come from? And as your base grows, you will need a sustainable means of generating and piping that oxygen around because generating it in one spot won't cut it and stand-alone generators become too expensive to maintain.
I'm on my third game now. Abandoned the first one because once I figured out the very basics it seemed better to start over than to try and reorganize everything. I abandoned the second one because I mismanaged resource use badly enough that I was in a couple of different holes (lack of coal, lack of algae, lack of alternate means) that I figured restarting again and NOT mismanaging the basics would be a better route.
In the third game I have spent inordinate amounts of time building basically a Rube-Goldberg machine to generate electricity and oxygen and pipe it around the base in a complex system that I will probably do a better job of designing next time.
And I think that's really the core gameplay here. You start unlocking sensors, logic gates (and-gates, or-gates, not-gates), and automation systems that you can arrange to build complex mechanisms that do useful things, stop tying up your colonists and ideally doesn't cause disasters. (At one point I accidentally crossed an oxygen pipe with a hydrogen pipe which pretty well collapsed my entire oxygen-and-power operation, though I was able to fix it before it got too bad.)
Still on the fence as to how much I like the game personally because I dunno if I prefer the "red wire machine building" gameplay over the Rimworld "RNG just fucked you" gameplay but for sure if you enjoy mixing a red wire / Space Engineers type system with a colony building system, I think you would enjoy this game a lot. Don't be fooled by the simple mechanics at the start of the game. It does ramp up in an organic feeling way and throws a lot of depth and complexity at you.
tl;dr:
You really want Redstone Wire type systems from Minecraft combined with a colony management game like Rimworld.
Rimworld is a colony management game that's basically about understanding the risks, building defensively against those risks and then eventually getting fucked by the RNG nature of the gameplay. Once you know how to mitigate risks, you're unlikely to die from, say, a sudden attack by murderous muffalo, or a heat wave, but the RNG system can still wear down even the best of players and it becomes a war of attrition where at the harder difficulties, attrition will eventually win. (Many of my Rimworld games just become "not fun anymore" enough that eventually I abandon them and restart because trying to recover from some 8th-in-a-row RNG disaster is possible but tiresome.)
Oxygen Not Included is a very different game and seems (24 hours in) largely built around the idea of "slow, endless pressure" and "the need for automation". There is no real combat that I've seen so far (though maybe that just comes later, I know there are entire stages of the game I've not reached yet), but I think the actual game mechanics have more depth than Rimworld and that's really what Oxygen Not Included is about: growing and managing some fundamentals that slowly get more complex, wide-spread and difficult to manage by hand.
For example, you need oxygen. You can generate oxygen with algae. You can dig and get algae but eventually you're going to run out and you start getting more "slime" instead. There is a process to convert slime to algae. Eventually you're going to run out of slime. You can also turn water into oxygen and hydrogen, which takes energy. Where does your energy come from? And as your base grows, you will need a sustainable means of generating and piping that oxygen around because generating it in one spot won't cut it and stand-alone generators become too expensive to maintain.
I'm on my third game now. Abandoned the first one because once I figured out the very basics it seemed better to start over than to try and reorganize everything. I abandoned the second one because I mismanaged resource use badly enough that I was in a couple of different holes (lack of coal, lack of algae, lack of alternate means) that I figured restarting again and NOT mismanaging the basics would be a better route.
In the third game I have spent inordinate amounts of time building basically a Rube-Goldberg machine to generate electricity and oxygen and pipe it around the base in a complex system that I will probably do a better job of designing next time.
And I think that's really the core gameplay here. You start unlocking sensors, logic gates (and-gates, or-gates, not-gates), and automation systems that you can arrange to build complex mechanisms that do useful things, stop tying up your colonists and ideally doesn't cause disasters. (At one point I accidentally crossed an oxygen pipe with a hydrogen pipe which pretty well collapsed my entire oxygen-and-power operation, though I was able to fix it before it got too bad.)
Still on the fence as to how much I like the game personally because I dunno if I prefer the "red wire machine building" gameplay over the Rimworld "RNG just fucked you" gameplay but for sure if you enjoy mixing a red wire / Space Engineers type system with a colony building system, I think you would enjoy this game a lot. Don't be fooled by the simple mechanics at the start of the game. It does ramp up in an organic feeling way and throws a lot of depth and complexity at you.
