Oxygen Not Included
BANGER · Strategy · 2019
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $24.99.
- Length
- 104.7h
- Value
- $0.24/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, Intel HD 4600 (AMD or NVIDIA equivalent), 3 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Oxygen Not Included is a space-colony simulation game. Deep inside an alien space rock your industrious crew will need to master science, overcome strange new lifeforms, and harness incredible space tech to survive, and possibly, thrive.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $7.49, set in December 2022. Its cuts run 60 percent off as a rule. There have been 62 in the 10 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 15 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 95 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games closest to it, Planetbase ($14.99, scores 49) and Gnomoria ($14.99, scores 30) both come in lower.
Critics scored it 85. Players sit 12 points higher at 97 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 16 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written August 2025 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,409 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 82 percent of the 3,410 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
104.7 hours to finish it, 418 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 4.0 times the campaign.
Still 7.5K concurrent players, 7 years in.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
The drop-off
71% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
7,545 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I bought this game thinking it was a cute, cozy cartoon colony sim from Klei. Instead, it systematically turned me into a mentally unhinged industrial dictator. First 10 hours: "Why are my dup peeing directly into the drinking water reservoir? Why is everyone suffocating in their own vomit?" 50 hours: Forced to open high school and college textbooks to re-learn the Laws of Thermodynamics, specific heat capacity, and...
The game is great. You'll definitely get your money's worth. Something I've noticed about many of these "sandbox" style games is that they aren't really a sandbox. Because there is very clearly a right way to play the game, Oxygen Not Included is more of a puzzle game than a sandbox. If you look at all of the content creators for the game on Youtube, they all play the same way. They don't even bother using like 70%...
Once you get over the character design (which is not for everyone, but those guys grow on you eventually), there's no way back. This is an unexpectedly deep physics sim in the most user-friendly wrapping I've seen so far in my decades of gaming. The game may seem somewhat easy at first, but don't let it fool you - something will eventually bite you on the ass. And the choice of things to go wrong is satisfyingly...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Oxygen Not Included scores 97/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/457140/oxygen-not-includedThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.