I’m a big proponent of the idea that “limitations breed creativity.” That’s part of the reason I love indie games so much! Gorgeous photorealistic graphics and hundreds of hours of gameplay are all well and good, but with a low budget comes a willingness to experiment, to be rough around the edges in a way that connects with its target audience with a specificity that something with a bigger budget could never manage. That ambition is what I see most in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist.

IWATE is, first and foremost, a coming-of-age story. Mechanically and thematically I’d liken this game to Citizen Sleeper, but unlike that game which takes place over a couple months, IWATE is set over the course of 10 years. Your protagonist, Sol, is only 10 years old when their spaceship, the Stratos, arrives on the alien planet Vertumna. In this new and dangerous world, Sol navigates their teen years alongside the foundation of their colony.

The breadth of IWATE’s themes is astounding. The inter- and intrapersonal journeys had while growing up juxtapose the material conditions of the colony and their settlement in new territory, with environmentalism and colonization being the primary ethical issues explored. As a teenager, when can we trust authority? As a civilian, when can we trust those in charge? What do we do when those stupid, no-good, bossy adults are the ones waging war? What about when community leaders neglect the needs of the next generation they’re meant to foster? Being a teenager is hard, but try going through puberty and adolescence in the uncharted alien wilderness. Through these topics and more, IWATE masterfully weaves together sci-fi and coming-of-age into something greater than the sum of its parts.

\\ (The following section has minor spoilers.)

During your first playthrough, you eventually learn that Sol is in a time loop. This is, in part, a diegetic justification for New Game+; it’s not like, say, Undertale, where the true story can only be unearthed through repeat playthroughs. If you’re satisfied, you can put down IWATE after your first playthrough. But you’d be missing out on a lot.

For Sol, this time loop is a blessing, not a curse. IWATE holds a great love and empathy for humanity and our potential. You can’t do everything in a single playthrough. There’s no “Golden” end, where you max out every stat, befriend everyone, and lead everyone to a perfect tomorrow. Instead, you’re encouraged to construct the lives Sol could lead, the different people they could grow up to be. Each life is equally as valid as the next. What role will you play for your community?

\\ (Spoilers end here.)

Of course, it’s only natural that IWATE falls into some pitfalls with its limitations. The more choices there are for a player to make, the more choices there are that need to be accounted for. I wish there were more ways for characters to die, I wish there were more unique endings instead of career endings, I wish romance didn’t fade into the background after you’ve gotten into a relationship. I wish the team had more resources to really flesh out everything I’ve mentioned and more. But if they had had those resources from the start, would I Was a Teenage Exocolonist exist? Limitation breeds creativity, after all.

I’ve played through IWATE twice, and I plan to play it many more times in the future. It’s ambitious and its breadth of scope is breathtaking. I haven’t discovered everything and I don’t think I ever will, but it’s that sense of infinite possibility that compels me to see what else I Was a Teenage Exocolonist has to offer.

“The child you were will not return.”

French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir argues in her 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity that 'existence precedes essence;' that the personality and the core beliefs of each human individual is defined through their environment and their actions, and that the challenges that allow those personality-shaping events are the ones that truly test the scope of the limits between their limitations and potential, their past against their future, the comfort of familiarity against the fear of the unknown.

"I Was a Teenage Exocolonist" is a quiet meditation on this and other questions asked by de Beauvoir and her fellow existentialists, packaged stealthily in the wrappings of a Solarpunk-themed dating game. Beneath the cotton candy colored environment of Vertumna and the egregiously tumblr-era character designs lies one of the best narrative experiences I've had in years, one that manages to succeed at the challenge of remaining both replayable and emotionally impactful. IWATE introduces the concepts of string theory, mortality, identity, collectivism, and on and on and on as each character you meet lives, grows, dies, lives again, and becomes a different person entirely.

When asked about the passing of her lover, the famed philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir simply said "His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.” Vertumna asks you to spend ten years with it before it lets you go, and readily welcomes you back again for the next loop of a cycle that continues on into infinity. But each of those cycles of ten years creates a unique you, and the life you live with its people is truly splendid.

ps: rex is best boy, even with the dumb tattoo, fight me

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I was a teenage exocolonist (which I will call “exocolonist” from now on because that name is too long) is a beautifully queer game.
Just how queer it is becomes obvious immediately during character creation. The game not only lets you choose your pronouns, it lets you customize them. You can have neopronouns. You can have he/him pronouns but use feminine terms like girl and mother. You can have she/they pronouns and use a mix of feminine, masculine, and neutral terms. Literally every single instance of this game using gendered language to refer to the mc is customizable. And your appearance and physical sex are customizable separately from all of this.
The relationships you can have with the other characters (and that they can have with each other) are also beautifully multifaceted. No romance option is gender locked. Some characters will start (queer) relationships on their own, no one is throwing themselves at your feet. There are multiple trans and nonbinary characters. One character is aroace. Not every romance starts at a high friendship level. Not every “romance” is a romance, some characters are happy to be your friends with benefits. Multiple characters are polyamorous. And some relationships in this game are queerplatonic, which is what queer people call relationships we can’t describe properly but they’re really beautiful.
Exocolonist has the best portrayal of gender, love, and sexuality out of any game I’ve ever played, except for maybe Heaven Will Be Mine.
is that what I want my review to be about? Isn’t this game so much more than just a dating sim?


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Exocolonist is a beautiful game about growing up.
Your experiences shape you. The memories you make become the cards you end up using to win the challenges later in your life. I wish the game wasn’t as committed to being a game in some parts because removing some treasured memory because I need to optimize my deck kinda sucks.
This alone already tells a beautiful growing up story, but what makes the game really special is how your relationships to the world, and especially the other children around you change. You start out doing either simple tasks or learning in school and end the game doing things that require highly specialized skills. Most of the adults go from treating you like, well, a child to treating you like an equal.
Your childhood friends will all develop in vastly different directions. Friends thought to be inseparable become bitter rivals. Some go down dark paths and you desperately try to stop them, not always succeeding. But some also grow to lead happy lives and you’re happy for them.
Exocolonist portrays the journey from child to young adult, both the good and the bad.
did I just write this entire review without mentioning that this is a cool science fiction story?


start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful political science fiction story.
You live in a Utopia that is unlike anything possible with our current technology. There are some interesting political thoughts in this game like how to encourage art in a (mostly) moneyless society, but it unfortunately doesn’t ever dive too deeply into any of them.
The game is also kinda weird about violence. It presents the positions of “violence is good when justified”, “violence is always bad”, and “violence is always bad but sometimes it is still necessary and justified” but there are multiple instances where you are forced to choose between the first two.
As a sci-fi story it has everything you could want. You’re one of the first children born in space, you and everyone else has cool genetic enhancements, you are part of a small group who are trying to be the first humans to life on an alien planet, there are cool aliens and the story explores the theme of living in harmony with nature or bending nature to your will and there’s a cool AI you can befriend and a wormhole and…
A wormhole
Yes, a wormhole. What was so special about this wormhole? Come on, tell the people

Yes, I know how to review this game now, but I’ll have to spoil a game mechanic that you might discover as early as reloading an old safe or as late as starting your second run. I had it spoiled for me before I started playing the game and didn’t mind at all but if you want an unspoiled experience I recommend you stop reading and start playing now


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Whenever a game has multiple routes/endings, people will replay it over and over. Some games use this to pad their playtime, some use it to tell the same story from different perspectives, and exocolonist deconstructs it to a degree.
In exocolonist, the mc retains some knowledge from previous playthroughs when you start a new game. This allows you to save people you couldn’t save the first time, take shortcuts to things that took a long time to solve previously and just generally makes your life easier.
This recontextualizes replays from being something you the player are doing to see all the content in this game to something the mc is doing to improve their life. No ending is perfect (though some are much closer to perfect than others) so there is always a reason to come back and try something differently.
Unfortunately for this game I played it after I played Everhood, so now a story about constantly relieving your life to chase after some unobtainable perfection feels slightly wrong to me. There is a way to break this loop, but the game portrays this as a bad ending and offers you to restore the loop with basically no consequences.
I’ll just pretend that after I got the ending that is as close to perfection to me as possible, the mc decided to stop this loop. I won’t replay the game again anytime soon. Solana’s happy.

That’s a pretty decent review but I still feel like it doesn’t do the game justice


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No review can do this game justice. It is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a queer dating sim, it’s about growing up, it’s a political sci-fi story and it’s a cool meta game, but it’s so much more than this.
This game is really special. Go and check it out.

I can't believe I Was A Teenage Exocolonist and Citizen Sleeper came out in the same year. What a time for tabletop-inspired visual novels.

This game is so cool. The art is unreal, the writing is some of the most natural I've ever seen, and the mechanics are streamlined perfectly.

Everyone should play this.

Relatively interesting. I gave this a go due to being in a mood for detailed, narrative RPGs and this being fairly well received. It's an interesting idea - playing through your teenage years in a colony trying to build a new life on an exoplanet. Your actions build your character's future skills, make and break friendships, or have an impact on the colony's structure and strength which can be the difference between life and death on this alien planet.

The idea is neat, and the overall story is genuinely interesting if you're into sci-fi - how could an exocolony not be? - and I was always interested in seeing what would happen at the end of each season through my action or inaction.

Mechanically the execution felt a little lacking with gameplay that often felt repetitive, consisting mostly of selecting rooms to work in each turn to gain some skill points in relevant attributes.

Similarly the card play felt like it could have been great, but instead peaked at good with a general level of okay/decent. Cards are acquired as "memories" based on your life in the colony which you then use in a minigame puzzle to complete challenge - and in terms of blending the story with the more "gamey" mechanics this felt like a great idea. Building a deck through the storytelling that reflected your character.. but largely you just acquire so many cards that the puzzle feels fairly similar no matter what decisions you've made.

Teenage Exocolonist is not a bad game, and I enjoyed playing it for a few hours for the sci-fi, exoplanet elements - but I don't think I'll be replaying to experience different events and endings.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a staggering work from developer Northway Games about a group of Earth runaways destined to colonize an alien planet. You create a character with custom attributes and then begin to build your life and future, as well as shaping the lives of others, from the ages of 10 to 20. Dealing with change, grief, life, destiny, capitalism, climate change, animal rights, and so much more, the game has A LOT to say. At times, it can be extremely heavy with no reprieve and at other times it can feel moderately repetitive and without a clear focus, but the desire to see your future may keep you invested to live amongst the stars.

IWATE is mainly a visual novel with strategy/deckbuilding elements. Most of the game is based on your core skills, separated into physical, mental, and social categories with 4 skills each. You can choose where to increase your stats, as performing any activity in your budding colony will raise your stats in some way. The game doesn't hide much about benefits from each action, so you can very easily plan what you want to spend your time on and craft a plan as to how to achieve your goals. There are many ways to advance your colony, from working with your parents in the gardening domes, taking classes, and working odd jobs to make some spending cash. These actions increase in volume and complexity as the years pass, but they are all relatively interesting and grow your arsenal naturally as you get older. In performing each activity, you are tasked with hitting certain skill checks. Simple dialogue options are a pass/fail (you need to simply have the skill number high enough), and others are a contested check. These "challenges" take the form of a card game, where you must assemble a row of up to 5 cards that can add up to the target number. You gain cards by just living, collecting memories, and using their special effects to increase your card score. I loved this system, and the memory cards made me really remember everything my character had been through in his journey. Cards gradually get better, and add crazier effects, so careful placement and strategy will be necessary to succeed. The game doesn't REQUIRE wins every time though, and the story adapts to mark when you fail. The game is very generous about its idea that life keeps moving on, and there is no fail state for the game at all.

The characters in your colony are an interesting bunch. The core cast are the kids who grow up with you, who you'll see mature and evolve as the decade passes. You get 13 months for 10 years to develop relationships with them, from totally distancing yourself from one to falling in love with another. I liked the freedom in choices here, and I was able to completely cut out some vile figures. Unfortunately, towards the back half of the game, I started to feel like there was little I could actually do to sway my relationships with the cast because actions I had made earlier or DIDN'T make had adverse affects and/or I didn't like who these people were growing up to become. I really value how human these people are written to be. There is no single "good" person, and everyone has their flaws and hostile moments, but they also give you genuine moments of heart, with grounded human conversations that dig to the core of humanity, love, and war. There are many fascinating scenes told here, and the sheer amount of text on display is worth the price of admission.

IWATE really hits its stride when it walks the careful balance between letting you choose what you want, but guiding you along with its story beats. Over the 10 years, the kids experience a lot of events, and the game pulls no punches. Unfortunately, much of the tension basically died by the last year of my playthrough, resulting in an ending that felt like the game didn't know what to do with my character or the future I had chosen. The game strongly recommends (and is essentially built for) many playthroughs to change outcomes and see what happens, but the game is just a little too long with no way to speed up progress for me to try the whole thing over immediately. I can see how little I actually was able to touch in one playthrough, but I can't help but be disappointed that I couldn't reach a "true" ending or find some closure for all characters in a clean way. I only hope a second or third playthrough could iron that out once you know more.

For fans of Persona and FE:3H, this game will be right up your alley. There is a lot of game here, and the learning barrier is not as high as other text-based RPGs like Disco Elysium or Citizen Sleeper. But while all of those games find a way to give you an ending worth the investment, I Was a Teenage Excolonist may leave you needing a reset to explore more of its secrets. However, ihe art and music are gorgeous and the script effortlessly floats between dozens of engaging themes and sci-fi concepts that really coalesces into a fleshed out, beautiful world to live in for a while.

Turns out the way to get me to play a roguelite deckbuilder is to make it a life sim where the runs are 5-8 hours long and the cards are tied to the narrative.

In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, you play as the eponymous teenage exocolonist (who knew?), born on a colony ship bound for the planet "Vertumna". The ship lands when you are age 10 and the game continues until age 20. Each year has various bespoke narrative events and about a dozen "turns" where you can grow your stats and manage your relationships.

Notable narrative events award you a new card, the deck contextualized as your memories. Cards have suits (yellow for social, blue for mental, red for physical), a number value, and possibly an extra effect like "+1 during mental challenges". For skill checks, you draw a hand from your deck and try to beat the goal number with the card slots available. You get extra bonuses from pairs, straights, flushes, et cetera. If you puzzle out the highest possible value with your cards, you get a minor cash reward. If you can't hit the goal, you can take a stress penalty to push through anyway.

It's a solid gameplay loop that carried me through a couple runs before I eventually turned on Debug Mode to skip every card battle and tweak stats to my liking (humans are just human, yeah?). There's also an option to ignore the cards entirely and turn the challenges into straight stat checks, if you're into that.

Of course, I wouldn't have cared about the cards and deckbuilding if not for the narrative context in which they exist. But the writing is... uh. Well. It doesn't really jive with my personal tastes, but I think it would for a lot of people. Another review (positively) describes the game as "queer socialist propaganda", and I can't really disagree with that assessment. I appreciate the game's politics, but not its aesthetic.

The colony is some kind of anti-capitalist, communal child-care, anti-cultural, vegetarian collective. You can change your name, appearance, and pronouns at any time along a spectrum of female-presenting to male-presenting. There are multiple romanceable characters across the LGBTQ+ spectrum and the game lets you date any of them, though that doesn't mean the relationship will always work out. It's better than I expected from a game that puts "you can date a dog-boy" on its Steam page, at least.

This is also a time loop story, which helps contextualize multiple playthroughs and allows you to pick options on later runs that help optimize your new life (a unique narrative strength of video games as a medium that has been insidiously co-opted by the isekai genre). For example, instead of spending several months figuring out a solution to an impending famine, you can guide characters directly to a solution you figured out last time, saving lives and giving you more time to spend patrolling the walls or repairing robots. Figure out someone's likes and dislikes, and those will stay in their character window in the next run.

But with one foot firmly embedded in the Twee Zone, Exocolonist could headline a Wholesome Direct (derogatory). Your menu doesn't have an Achievements section, it has a "Cheevos" section. Vertumna is cast entirely in pastel blues, pinks, and yellows; populated by aliens like "floatcows" and "unisaurs". Every character has a cutesy hippy name that's shortened from a longer word, so you're hanging out with Marz (Marzipan), Kom (Kombucha), Tonin (Melatonin), Seeq (Obsequious), et cetera. The fictional space sport is literally called "sportsball". Un-fucking-bearable.

The game advertises a large number of endings, but it's more of an Obsidian-style modular ending slides thing. Depending on what jobs you picked most often and the status of your relationships, you get some paragraphs about how they all turned out. I played enough to get three different job-related endings and most of the bespoke endings that require more specific sequences of events, and my Steam runtime is listed at about 35 hours. Though, as noted, this was with me using Debug Mode to speed up later runs considerably.

Despite my issues, I'd say enjoyed my time with Exocolonist. While I'd love to see its broad structure applied to an aesthetic I find more personally appealing, its (relative) simplicity compared to the big RPGs I usually play starts the creative gears turning in my head. Whether it's actually realistic or not, games like this and Citizen Sleeper make me wonder if this is something I could do one day, as late a start as it might be.

A thought for another day, perhaps.

I saw this recommended a lot by cozy gamers. I LOVED the first playthrough of the game, and was invested enough to replay the game to see variations. However, I felt by the 3rd playthough it became a bit of a chore to play. There were certain story beats that would always occur, especially in the early game for an optimal playthrough. While I enjoy the characters, it got to a point where I was hunting for endings rather than character routes. The card game was okay at first, but it got to a point where you could cheese through any type of challenge with the same deck. At the end of it all, I still loved my first few playthroughs of it. The game is definitely replayable, but not as much as I expected from online discussion.

This game is compelling for a plethora of reasons but my reason for not being able to put this game down is because I wasn't satisfied with the endings I was getting. Because of that I kept playing and each playthrough, each session there was something new to learn whether it be about the world or the characters I loved that.

Starting off with the music it works in tandem with the game being effective when it wants to be and being unconcerned and peaceful otherwise. I daresay this is my favorite cast of characters in any game of all time I could only find one I didn't like but that's because I personally found him revolting but he could also be the best and I'm just missing out. The main plot is great. The art is very good. The gameplay is in a interesting spot for me. I like it and had trouble understanding it to its core but once you do it just clicks.

This is a must-play if you don't mind reading and love getting enthralled with a great world with amazing characters.

at first I thought "oh, yet another VN with a silly name". this game broke me in the best way possible. I had been craving for a good story driven game for a while now.

at first I ignored its existence, but then in the last steam sale it popped up and I was like "oh it has a demo? ok why not". immediately bought the game after the demo.

amazing story and characters, with cool time management and challenge mechanics.

A game that could very easily have fallen into any number of pitfalls in the messages it tried to convey or they ways it tried to convey them, but deftly dodges every one. A game about numbers and systems and relationship values that is steadfastly against the idea of gamifying life and relationships, that asks us to value each other and the in-between moments of life.

On my good days, I’m here. On my bad days, I’m still here.

Losing parts of ourselves and our identities are as essential to the experience of living as growing them is. Individuals can only do so much but they can still be so much for each other, and that’s worth as much as anything else. In a world where there is no ultimate victory for ideology or faction, where there is no intrinsic value in any one outcome that is ultimately worth more than any other, we’re still gonna find ourselves in each other.

I’m still here.

Pros:
- Well written dialogue with good characters who develop as they age alongside your character
- Great sci-fi worldbuilding, much of my enjoyment was just learning more about the alien planet and its ecosystems as you build up the colony
- Large variety of choices to really personalize your character and their traits from age 10 to 20, as well as letting you adjust your appearance and gender/pronouns whenever you like which was much appreciated
- The game’s deck card system is simple but makes for an interesting alternative to standard skill checks, and can adjust its difficulty to your liking
- Calming OST that doesn’t get in the way but greatly adds to the game’s atmosphere
- Incentive to replay due to the mechanic of remembering events from your past playthrough, which can open up even more choices (though I only did two full runs)

Cons:
- As the game nears age 20, it can start to feel a bit aimless as you exhaust most unique events and kinda go through the motions til it ends a bit anticlimactically. But this probably depends on your story choices since there’s quite a few different endings

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a difficult game to explain - it’s part life sim, part visual novel, and part deck builder. Miraculously, I think it brings those elements together remarkably well even if it doesn’t quite nail some of the individual mechanics.

We played this game for Pride Month and I was thrilled by how well queer themes are presented throughout the entire game. The game opens and you get to choose your gender and pronouns, but more importantly - you can also adjust your gender throughout the game adding a lot of fluidity and freedom to how gender and sexuality is represented. Relationships throughout the game are not as binary and homogenous as we’re used to. It’s a wonderfully queer game.

The life sim elements are the main foundation of Exocolonist as you work on improving your skills and relationships with the other characters. The deck building comes into play as you have to basically assemble poker hands to beat challenges throughout the game using cards you’ve acquired through events and skill-building. My main annoyance with the deck-building is that it’s much easier to accumulate cards than it is to get rid of them. You get a few opportunities to remove random cards but you can’t fully tailor your deck to your liking as much as you typically can in deck-builders.

I’ve lost track of the amount of games that tout the whole “your choices matter” thing, but there aren’t a lot of games that do it better than Exocolonist. I feel like 50 people could play this game and all have pretty different experiences depending on which skills they decide to work on, which colonists they decide to be friends with, and which events trigger because of how you play the game. It’s pretty cool talking to friends and seeing how we all had pretty different experiences. However, because the game is built so dynamically, sometimes it doesn’t totally react properly to things you’ve done. For instance, I got a card late in the game that featured a character that had died years earlier.

Overall, I loved my experience playing through the game and it was cool how much the story I told really felt like my own. The game has so many different possible endings and events that could happen, it makes me want to play it again and maybe I’d do that if the runs weren’t 10 hours long.

+ Fantastic queer representation
+ Fun story with great characters that evolve in meaningful ways as the game progresses
+ The game reflects your choices so well that your experience ends up feeling unique
+ Neat card system for beating challenges
+ Great character art and illustrations

- Deck-building is limited
- Card puzzles get a bit stale
- Some game elements don’t react properly to your choices
- Multiple playthroughs are encouraged but the game is too long for that

Absolutely terrific game.

The gender/pronouns customization for your character is outstanding, and the game really lets you play and make choices according to how you wish to present your character (and even change certain things on the fly). Plus the optional content warnings are sure to be useful to those who need it.

The game itself is a narrative adventure game set in an extra-solar start up colony, where you make choices and develop your character and their relationships from childhood and through their teens. Throughout, there’s plenty of potential to affect change in the people around you, and the colony at large as you make choices and each year brings its own challenges and narrative wrinkles.

The whole thing (to me) feels very inclusive. The story is gripping, and the characters all have interesting personalities and motivations. Be prepared to experience both happy and crushingly sad moments for your character and the people around them over the course of the game.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is one of those games that, once you finish it, you immediately want to start again to see what other choices you could’ve made. The game also encourages this, sprinkling in moments of deja-vu where your character “remembers” these past lives and allows you to make certain new choices in future playthroughs. I love how this was implemented, and the many possible endings means that I’ll likely play this at least once more.

There are some narrative hiccups, though. It’s possible to experience certain (in my case minor) events out of order. Like seeing a scene where two characters are in a relationship, and then seeing another scene later where it reads like the characters just met. Stuff like that. This happened maybe two or three times in my first playthrough, which was about 10 hours long, so it’s a minor flaw that’s easy to excuse.

I’m really glad I played this game. If any of the above things I mentioned interests you, it’s definitely worth playing!

Interesting game, but it does feel a little too long in the tooth. The writing is well done and I liked that you can't do everything in one go, and things will go wrong and people will die and you might not finish a questline in time to stop someone from doing something or solving some problem - but the gameplay is very one note and gets tedious very quickly. I did one and a half playthroughs and I'm honestly spent on this game. I don't think I'll ever go back to it, but what I did experience was very good. I just wish there was a way to experience the story in a much faster way on replay.