Good evening you are listening to Throo's ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney, here with GameSpeets special slime-lung correspondent, Rowan Kaiser.

I've really tempted the cough right now.

Yeah, you actually have a case of the slime lung this week, as it turns out.

We're also joined by Nicole Clark, freelance writer, and one of my favorite people I've worked with

at Vice.

Oh, thank you.

That's so sweet.

Really excited to be on the pod with you this week.

So this week we've been lost deep beneath the surface in Clay's oxygen not included.

A ill-fated space colony management game that I've sort of been beating my head against

for the past couple weeks.

And Nicole, actually, in some ways, I think this is your fault, because you wrote a piece

for us that did a really good job of selling me on this game, but you said up front,

it was kind of tough to figure out and parse and get into, but nevertheless, I was still

unprepared for how mercilessly this game would send my colony just into fatal, gruesome tailspins.

Can you tell us a little bit about, like, what is oxygen not included?

There's a lot of city builders management games out there.

What kind of is the main thrust of oxygen not included?

So your intro about it being merciless is just completely right.

It's basically a base building sim, but I would also call it almost an engineering sim.

So you have these little duplicants, which are characters that have ray guns that allow them to do things like building and breaking down little cubes

of area. And so you're dropped off in this land, and the game is called oxygen not included.

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