An insanely addictive game with engrossing life sim/RPG elements intermingled with the story. While I generally didn't find the actual writing particularly compelling, the gameplay and story integration is very satisfying and the characters are likeable and interesting enough. I hesitate to give it a full 5 stars because while it's a very finely-crafted experience I don't know that it's one that will necessary stay with me for a while, but it's up there as some of the most fun I have had with a game.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is an interesting game with a lot of moving parts that have a distinct take on social simulation VN games like Princess Maker. The game tackles a lot of interesting science fiction ideas, with an engaging story that encourages multiple play throughs so that someone can get various different endings and variations on each playthrough to make each one feel unique as you cannot complete everything in one playthrough, much less your first which does lock you out of certain content.

However, the gameplay does not support multiple playthroughs. Each playthrough is very lengthy and time consuming, while the means of playing the game being tiring after even just one playthrough. The VN portions while having decent albeit young adult writing, can start to feel dull due to the text window needing a bit more refinement. The day to day movement along the map while being charming at the start begins to overstay its welcome due to the way it handles finding collectables which are very helpful with low respawn rates and also when events come up with certain characters, requiring you to run around the entire map every day to ensure nothing new came up. Furthermore, while the card game is interesting and fun at the start, it overstays its welcome and gets extremely tedious later on, especially once you start doing a lot of expeditions outside of the colony where you do multiple card game checks a day. The game just doesn't support multiple playthroughs through its gameplay, since it gets dull halfway through your first playthrough and will only get worse as you get to other playthroughs.

Speaking of, in your first playthrough there are many things you cannot do until your second playthrough, which does lock out some things. This would be really cool and something I would praise the game for, but its rough when each playthrough is so incredibly draining that I do not think I can handle a full second playthrough despite the good ideas behind it. As it is, this does mean the game locks you out of being able to get with one of the 2 women characters that will actually stay with your character in the ending, since 2/3 of the women characters you can date in your first playthrough will break up with you and sleep around with others after it despite you telling said character you're fine with open relationships, which can feel a bit problematic considering everyone in this game is bisexual so 2/3 first route romances with bi women end in getting broken up with for them to mess around feeling like a harmful stereotype. Speaking of, a lot of progressive ideas in this game can feel almost regressive or problematic at times which can be quite rough. While it has some interesting things to say about gender, some stereotypes and how it expresses polyamory, open relationships, and sexuality in general can be very rough. I will say I will always appreciate a piece of media that tries and fails to explore LGBTQ+ topics than one that doesn't bother at all, but it still bears bringing up.

Definitely a very ambitious, creative, and interesting game that is dragged down by a tedious gameplay loop that doesn't evolve enough as the game progresses to be able to support all the content in the game. Which is a shame, since there is a lot of good content in this game post a first playthrough that is worth exploring. I will probably get back to other playthroughs another time, but right now I feel it would be unfair to be trudging through gameplay I am burned out on to get to the new content.

This was a roller coaster, where I'd experience highs of genuine awe realising just how far I could affect my own character's, and the world's, fate, then lows of utter disappointment at how meaningless so many interactions with the core cast of the game actually are, and how little they truly matter. The art, by Bkomei, is spectacular, and the overall execution of this extremely promising idea is positive, but a core aspect of the game feels unfinished. Still, a game that so effectively blends visual novel elements with a life simulation game and deck building aspects is one of a kind.

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.

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.

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!

Despite its Sci-Fi setting I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, like few other games I have played, encapsules what it is like growing up.
To become an adult, see you friends grow up into real humans with opinions and hopes and dreams that sometimes mesh with yours, and sometimes clash. Some people you will be close to forever, some you might grow apart from.
Discovering romance and sex, in all its innocence and awkwardness and sweetness. Celebrate birthdays. Morn losses.
Look back at it all, years later, realizing that you truly are a combination of everything you ve ever met, and everything that ever happened to you

(copied from my gg review)

this game is so good it's insanity actually. the premise & gameplay are so simple, and yet it hooks you hard! i've never been THIS invested in a game's worldbuilding - you literally got no choice but to try to do multiple playthroughs to see how each event might turn up with every different decision.

p.s. tangent and rex, you both are beloved to me

Ridiculously engaging VN! While it can be considered a dating sim, I think it does plot and friendships better. (More later.) Plot is amazing, characters are (mostly) likable and have growth! Epilogues are very detailed, the best in any game I've seen! Love the main gameplay draw, that you remember your past lives and can influence events in your next playthrough! Many different activities with unique scenes that help subsequent playthroughs feel fresh! You can have pets (and interact with them-not just eye candy!) Graphics are pretty, and I like that the seasons are part of the plot too, also not just eye candy! Card battles help add some variety.

My main complaint is that some of the things you need to do (either for friendships or dating) can feel uncomfortable. There are a few characters that you need to break up to be able to date. There are a few characters that will break up with you in the epilogue no matter what. Hence why I'm hesitant to like this game as a dating sim. There's a character that starts off pretty toxic, and while there is growth if the friendship is high enough, to get that friendship up you have to pick options with violence towards creatures. In this same vein: there's a character that will always die, and for a game that's main draw is replaying to save characters, this feels bad.

A smaller complaint, but it can feel repetitive/grindy on subsequent playthroughs. It does a good job of having enough content/adding content, but a lot of big character/plot scenes will repeat.

I still recommend this VN and had a great time! I spent 64 hours on two playthroughs.

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

I have so much great things to point out that I'll probably forget half of them!

My first long review (because this game deserves it):

This game has everything I love from games: marvellous world-building, perfect screenwriting, the characters feeling ALIVE when you're getting to know them and having events with them, lovely aesthetics, heartwarming little details, how it's political without turning tedious, the super interesting choices-matter mechanic accompanied by the timeloops, how LGBTQ+ friendly it is and the management mechanics

Once I started playing, I couldn't stop thinking about the game while I was doing other stuff; wondering what skills I'd like to polish. Plus, right now that I finished my first game, I can't wait to try out the timeloop mechanics!!

I remember that, at first, I was only planning in becoming an explorer, a kind one, however, when circumstances started to show up, I grew attached to the characters and the nature, to the point that when "circumstances" happened, I decided to fight to be a governor and protect peace forever

And that's just how great the game is! There's so many endings, so many options to select from!!!

It has every quality I like from Stardew Valley, Detroit: Become Human, Spellcaster University, Sims, Monster Prom, Death and Taxes, Animal Crossing and more

I wish the developer made a sequel or something like that!!!! Perhaps just another game with similar mechanics and loooovely characters

Anyways, some other thing I'd like the game to accomplish in the future is that we get it in different languages <3

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

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.

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.