I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

While this is a fun, well-crafted game, I feel this game does not succeed on all fronts, and any recommendation needs to be clear about genre. Personally, this was less of a "choices matter" roleplaying game and more of a digital boardgame with some narrative and dating-sim elements. What I mean by this is that while there is a story to discover, you aren't really playing a character. The artwork and writing clearly have a lot of effort put into them, and the game mechanics (choosing monthly actions, managing stress and deckbuilding) create a really satifying optimisation puzzle. But, apart from some options being gated by skill levels, your character's skills don't make them better at that thing, and there is a sort of dissonance that you want to choose actions that your character is "worse" at so as to max out more skills and unlock more conversation options. Narrative-wise, while some choices lead to NPC deaths or different endings, your overall impact is fairly shallow. Perhaps I am being unfairly critical because of the ten-year span of the game. Imagine if you re-experienced your childhood, and no matter what you did or said all your one-dimensional friends ended up making exactly the same choices. You can convince your friend to leave an abusive relationship, but you can't prevent them from getting into it or date them before that. No matter what you do, you will not be considered by the game to be certain characters' best friend. You can also freely tell each friend exactly what they want to hear without needing to back that up with action. You can tell your pacifist friend that you agree violence against animals is never ok, and then immediately go on a hunting trip.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a very cute, caramel-coated game in the “a little bit of everything” genre. It’s part RPG with dialogue choices, part visual novel, part card game, part dating sim, and part simulator of turning a schoolkid into a person with the required stats. And in all of these aspects, the game is... tolerable? The best thing I can say about the card mechanics is that they’re optional and can be turned off. It’s a good example of a game that exists not because of its gameplay, but in spite of it, and still works beautifully. It gets people emotionally invested, steals several evenings from their families, and carries them away to stomp around the dusty paths of distant planets. The dating sim gets considerably more attention than the science fiction, and there’s a whole rainbow of romanceable characters with so many pronouns that hardcore opponents of gender theory might experience a hypertensive crisis. To the game’s credit, you know what you’re getting basically from the cover. You don’t spend half the game assuming you’re playing a conventional dating sim only to discover that you’ve somehow wandered into a polycule of nonbinary, ethically non-monogamous, blue-haired feminists. The signs were there. For my first playthrough, I picked Tangent based on her description, and honestly, she ended up being my favorite romance in the entire game. A nerdy girl who loves science rather than you and has no interest in a traditional family. Obviously, an instant crush. Every conversation with her is a little celebration of the heart because she’s a transhumanist who loves going off about how weak flesh is and advocating for a “balanced life through chemicals.” Absolute cinema. My second favorite is Nomi. They’re a nonbinary, apparently ace character who seems to have ADHD and has no idea what they’ll become when they grow up. Nomi is extremely relatable to creative people who can generate good ideas ten times faster than they can actually implement them. Ace characters in dating sims are rare enough on their own; ADHD-coded ones are even rarer. I didn't romance them, but their route with Rex is genuinely sweet. The romance part was actually good and enjoyable for me. Now for what I liked less. The science-fiction element is weak. Vertumna is comically hospitable to humans. You can eat random local plants straight off the bush, which is not exactly what I expect from a biosphere produced by an entirely separate evolutionary history. In fact, it seems considerably more accessible to an unprepared human than, say, Australia. The planet is also so “hostile” that you can spend the entire year outside wearing a T-shirt and shorts, including during the snow season. Even a different atmospheric composition would have sold some sense of frontier danger. I get it, hazmat suits probably don't help the dating-sim vibe, but still. The other disappointment is that instead of really exploring group dynamics, adaptation to extreme stress, and psychological defenses in an isolated environment, we get a rather cardboard conflict. On one side are the adorable integrationists who want to befriend every friendly tentacle they encounter. On the other are the aggressive militarists who want to burn xenos, heretics, and traitors while going da-ka-da-ka-da-ka. There are no rationalist characters taking a genuinely science-based ethical approach to the challenges of colonization, like: “Maybe we shouldn’t ingest the mysterious alien substance until we’ve tested it in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial.” The colony’s perimeter security is basically “a hole in the fence that children climb through.” Realistically, this level of negligence should be incompatible with survival. And yes, I can already hear you saying: stop complaining and go reread [i]Rendezvous with Rama [/i] or [i]The Invincible[/i], or at least [i]The Martian[/i]. It’s naive to expect a mature and fully developed sci-fi setting from a visual novel with a time loop. True. But that’s exactly why it’s so frustrating. They had all the cards in their hands. The characters are genuinely good, the art is beautiful, and the game is ridiculously addictive. There’s an enormous amount of unrealized potential here. I keep wondering whether everyone who wrote the lore for Mass Effect is now retired, sitting on coconuts in Bali. Could the industry perhaps hire them back? The people, I mean. Not the coconuts.

I must saw, bravo. I've played this game a lot and have gone through multiple paths and storylines, and I love the challenge! Nothing will be as special as my first playthrough, but I love getting the achievements, seeing what I can do different, trying new jobs and paths, and trying to get all the endings! I got this game when I was really obsessed with space and aliens, so it was awesome to see the progression of the storyline and the characters. I love all the characters and how different they are, and all the secrets you can find throughout each playthrough.