Imagine a scenario: you and your small crew have just crash-landed on a desolate planet devoid of an atmosphere. Outside of your ship is the merciless vacuum of space, and while there is some oxygen below, it’s chased upward by rising toxic gases. To survive, you need not only food and water but a way to recycle, pump, and produce oxygen, as well as produce electricity to power your distress beacon, even if doing so reliably creates more toxic carbon monoxide to deal with.
This is the situation players are faced with in Adaptory, a survival colony sim with a heavy emphasis on micromanaging what you breathe.
In simple terms, players familiar with RimWorld can imagine Adaptory as a very similar experience. Your colonists all have personality traits and needs such as their hunger and mood, and they automatically build, sleep, and relax while fitting your orders into their schedules. The added twist is a big focus on air and gas filtration, pumping out or otherwise managing toxic gases, and keeping your space filled with breathable air.
Actually, Adaptory is very similar to another title, Oxygen Not Included, which seems to have been the direct inspiration for the game. Adaptory, made by what I understand to be a solo dev, clearly seems to be a fan-made spiritual successor to ONI (Oxygen Not Included), and it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that the game is sort of a simplified version of ONI‘s concepts and mechanics, at least in its Early Access build.
Unfortunately, the simplified approach in Adaptory is also missing out on some core design nuances featured in its inspiration, and it prominently has some problems that don’t exist in the more established title.
One of the biggest intentionally designed issues, in my opinion, is a lack of a clear explanation of how the gas filtering system works. Now, I’m not an HVAC technician, but when I look at the game’s rather simplified air filtration process, it immediately seems pretty clear to me: a pump should suck in the gas around it, move it through pipes, and dispel it from a vent.
This doesn’t always appear to be the case; occasionally it seems to work, but other times the pump itself seems to spew gas into a room. Walls that are supposedly airtight seem to be inconsistent with allowing gas in or out, and gas pressure is a mechanic I simply didn’t feel I understood any better after the game’s tutorial.
I am 100% willing to believe that part of this is an error on my part; I don’t pretend to be the best gamer or the smartest puzzle solver, so on some level, I could have just been failing to grasp otherwise obvious mechanics. However, the fact that the gas acts more like a liquid definitely does not help with the filtering element; you would think that to vent out an area efficiently, you should put a vent at the top of the room, but gas takes up a physical space like water and doesn’t actually respond to airflow. To pump a room of its gas, you have to put your fan inside the gas itself and at the lowest point possible, which just seemed weird to me.
Odd design choices aside, the game is riddled with outright bugs. Areas that should be accessible to my colonists won’t be worked on because something blocks their view to the construction area, such as trying to build a pipe on the square above a pipe. Sometimes, settlers will clip through the floor when constructing flooring, trap themselves in a hole, and instantly die. These are just the most memorable of several bugs I faced, which, of course, are to be expected in an Early Access game.
The most frustrating aspect of all, however, is that the colonists have no AI programming, or their programming is bugged, that tells them to, well, value their life. If trying to learn the game’s filtration systems wasn’t hard enough for me, I also had to micromanage my colony of tiny idiots who loved to take their lunch breaks or naps in areas flooded with poisonous gas. I had too many occasions to count where I looked away for a moment to build something and then found my entire crew dead because they decided to take a nap in the vacuum of space or stood in a cloud of CO2 with an air pocket two tiles away.
If only one thing were to be fixed as the game goes through Early Access, it would definitely need to be the AI of the colonists, who are supposed to be hands-off and self-sufficient. When you pair their tendency to die for stupid reasons with their high-pitched, squeaky voices, it felt like I was leading a colony of suicidal guinea pigs.
Adaptory is not, by any stretch of the word, a bad game. The developer clearly has passion for the title, and I can definitely see it getting better if they keep working at it. It’s a good thing it’s in Early Access, because there is a lot that needs to be fixed. If you really want to check it out, I say go ahead, but be aware of the current build’s bugs and frustrating AI before you do.
Pros:
- An interesting colony sim inspired by Oxygen Not Included
- A strong foundation to build off of in its Early Access state
Cons:
- Lots of bugs in the current EA build
- Frustrating AI that can trigger a game over easily if you aren’t paying attention
- Poorly explained filtration systems and awkward gas physics
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