I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
Spend your teenage years on an alien planet in this narrative RPG with card-based battles. Explore, grow up, and fall in love. The choices you make and skills you master over ten years will determine the course of your life and the survival of your colony.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a choices matter, deckbuilding and life sim game
developed by Northway Games
and published by Finji.
Released on August 25th 2022 is available in English on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
It has received 3,433 reviews of which 3,322 were positive and 111 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.3 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 12.25€ on Steam and has a 50% discount.
The Steam community has classified I Was a Teenage Exocolonist into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at I Was a Teenage Exocolonist through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7 (SP1+), Windows 10 and Windows 11
- Processor: x86, x64 architecture with SSE2 instruction set support.
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: DX10, DX11, DX12 capable.
- DirectX: Version 10
- Storage: 2 GB available space
MacOS
- OS: Catalina 10.15+
- Processor: Apple Silicon, x64 architecture with SSE2.
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Metal capable Intel and AMD GPUs
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Linux
- OS: Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04, CentOS 7, and similar
- Processor: x64 architecture with SSE2 instruction set support.
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL 3.2+, Vulkan capable.
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
It's been about a year since I finished my first ending and which also marks a year that I've spent searching for games *like* IWATEX to fill that hole that it left and have sadly come up short. I'm in love with... almost everything about this game, from the art, to the setting, to the characters, to the story, just about everything. The part I love most is getting to grow up and watching the other kids grow up and become their own people and navigate the colony alongside me. Awh it's just genuinely such a good game. I wish a game mechanic where I could grow up with a wide variety of other characters and befriend and possibly romance them was present in so many other games. Just... wow.
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This ones a tough one for me because the more I play it the less I like it. All start by describing the layout of the game. The game is based in a "month by month system" there's very few things you can do in that month besides clicking on the area you want to gain your stats in and talking to some of the characters. Except the expedition where there's multiple separate interactions, though they will run up your characters stress. Making you have to rest in the next month or the following if you want to maximize your progress for the previous month. You will have to go through different options and avenues to get certain ending within the 10 years of your life. Now to the pros and cons. pros: The first few play through were nice to figure out new things and i do appreciate that after a few play through you don't have to go through the same hoops like solving the food problem. I love that you can move around in the world and don't have to go to a separate screen and click on a picture to get somewhere in town. I enjoy the stats bar that lets you develop your character depending on the classes and or areas you pick to spend that "Month" in. The art is pretty and music is nice for the first few play through. If you don't click on another character you can go back to the last auto save point. so if you pick a dialog option and you didn't like the outcome you can reload the last auto save which will take you back to the same spot before the dialog happened. I think this is a huge plus because sometimes one dialog can make a difference in the outcome and I hate having to start the game over because of one small area. With that said if you do get the game save often on new slot that way if after a few months you want to change stuff you can go back; or if you want one mid game ending and want to continue through with the rest of the game you can go back to the last save before you got the mid game ending. Meaning in one play through you could get 3 different ending cards. The cards system at first is fine and pretty enjoyable, but after going through a few play through i just turn it off during most of the game and only turn it back on when big events come up. Which I would say is a plus that they give you that option to turn it off. There are usually 3 different dialog options to pick from when talking to characters which isn't bad because its not just yes or no. 1 or 2 type of scenarios. Cons: The biggest con i have with the game is the forced ending cards. What I mean by this is that with all the characters there's only a few different ending options and that's it. platonic or romantic. Theres very little change even in multiple play through. Example would be theres characters that no matter what you do in the game will break up with you by the end. This for me really irks me because at the end of the day it almost feels pointless to romance them because you know nothing will change. I get that it would take a little more effort in running the algorithm system, but really! You can't make an ending where the stay together. Like UGH! Another con is the limit in what you can do during each month. especially for certain endings that you can't even start to achieve until half way through the game. meaning your just trying to run to get through that certain point and hope you didn't make a wrong dialog option that will cause a different ending. I get it. Its a game and that's supposed to make it challenging that your unsure of the play through endings??? To me it just feels like an annoyance. Hopefully you made that save five years back or your starting from scratch. It does get dry considering how many play through and hours you have to spend to hopefully get the ending you want. Especially since the dialog and events don't really change between play through. Again I get it would make the game much bigger and take longer with more options but with a lot of forced events it does drag heavily the more times you play. Back to the romance. If your expecting a very romantic game like I was this is not it. You can't even really romance people until your late teen years and even that is covered by very few dialog scenes that can repeat in one play through. As a kid most you get is a flirt option here or there. Pretty lackluster to me. In the end, I would still say its a good game. Mostly because of the different play structure I can't really find in other novel games that makes it unique and fun enough for me to go through handful of game runs. I just really wish there was some changes that make me want to continue to get all the endings it has to offer. However, I struggle to pick up this game again only to go through the same motions for a different ending. Like it sounds good for a moment, but I end up choosing something else to do as the substance has died out for me. Again, consider that i have put a lot of time in this game for what its worth to get to the point of not wanting to pick it back up.
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When I started this review, I'd just finished my second playthrough. 30 hours. Two endings. I cried both times, for different reasons. The game has *significant* replay value. It will take hundreds of hours to 100%. And I will give it those hours. I've given it 160 so far. This is the best game I've ever played. There, that's the review. More Detail: Shockingly well written, the game is beautiful, and terrifying, and packed with incredible ideas and characters. It is several novels in length. Novels I was thrilled to consume. ...that I was *desperate* to consume. Exocolonist is so perfectly in alignment with my understanding of the universe, so utterly validating, that I will be heartbroken if the authors, Sarah Northway and Lindsay Ishihiro, don't extend this universe in some way. Another game, a series of books -- anything. When the game went on sale, I bought a copy for everyone on my Friends List. I wish I knew more people, so I could buy more copies. If you are interested enough to be reading the reviews, buy this game. It's everything you want it to be. Even More Detail: The Art: it's adorable, beautiful, and sexy. And there's a lot of it. The Music: it's perfect. Both the ambient and gameplay tracks, as well as its absolute banger of a single. The Mechanics: Open World blended with intricate Dialogue Trees and a card-game mechanic that is fun without being intrusive. Playthrough Length: Depending on how you play (and how quickly you read), it will take 10-20 hours the first time, a little longer the second time, and maybe 5-10 hours for subsequent playthroughs. Replayability: Nabokov said a novel cannot be read, it can only be re-read. Well, this is a game you can only really re-play. You'll see. Yet MORE Detail: The game was built in Unity, and could run on a potato, if the potato had a large enough screen. The game has no voice acting, it's all text, images, and play. The game is 13+. Not because it would harm a younger child, just because its themes reward an older mind. The game makes meticulous use of autosaves and tracks hundreds of variables. Characters grow and develop whether you're watching them or not, just like in real life. Short One Gaming (on YouTube) said: "It's like every character is the protagonist of their own, separate game." That is an incredible achievement. It is worth taking your time and thinking about your choices. The nature of your playthrough is *dramatically* dependent upon how you approach the game's challenges. So does the game have flaws?: Not really. Like in real life, you can eventually reach a point where your skills are still useful but don't increase when you use them. That can feel like an opportunity cost, at times. You have far less control over the deckbuilding aspect of the card game than in a traditional deckbuilder, but the card game is very forgiving. Perhaps too forgiving, in fact: although the game tells you straight out that losing "isn't always a bad thing," challenges aren't actually difficult enough to make failure a consequence of anything but inattention. This means missing out on the cool things that happen when you *don't* succeed, unless you fail on purpose. If the game has a real flaw, this is it. It needs an "extreme mode" for the card game, or something. That said, you *can* turn the card game off. That will determine your success/failure algorithmically, which may be a better option for experiencing some parts of the story. That's my complete review. This is one of those "hidden gem" games that would be an international blockbuster if we rewarded merit instead of publicity. I will *never* recover if this is the last lifesim RPG that Northway and Ishihiro make together. Thank you, if you're reading this, either of you. Thank you for this incredible game.
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I'm not normally prone to hyperbole, but I Was a Teenage Exocolonist genuinely is a modern classic. The quality of the writing, the complexity of the characters, the emotional investment, and the amazing replayability make this game stand out. Currently Exocolonist has nowhere near the profile or credit it deserves, and I would encourage anyone on the fence about whether this is likely to be their thing to give it a go. Please. Exocolonist is very much its own game, however it straddles a space somewhere between visual novel (VN), RPG and princess builders (such as Long Live the Queen and Volcano Princess). The risk of dropping a term like “visual novel” about a game such as this is that it risks creating the impression of click and read. I hate click and read, and most VNs leave me cold. I therefore use the term advisedly because it’s not like that at all. What the game is, instead, is heavily story driven with more reading than most people are likely used to. In Exocolonist you play as the main protagonist arriving on a new colony world. Your primary interactions are with other colony ship children who age together with you across seasons and years until you are 20 years old, at which point the game ends. Gameplay involves walking around different, smallish, maps interacting with other characters, building up skills and relationships, and revealing factoids about the other children, the new world you have colonised, and ultimately the adult world going on around you and their politics. Most events and interactions trigger stat increases across 12 broad categories. What areas you focus on can dramatically alter the events that you trigger and the skill checks you are able to pass across your journey. All main characters are potentially romanceable, although mostly in a pragmatic way – which is to say, most romance chains stay effectively platonic and the characters you romance maintain their own autonomy and quirks. The relationship outro also inevitably peters off into melancholy – for example distant characters stay distant, they drift away emotionally or get absorbed in their work, etc. Kind of like real life. Or you can completely skip all romance chains and focus on saving your colony from collapse, or investigating this strange new planet you have found yourself living on, or on a career, or (eventually) playing politics with the adults. It’s all very adult, and realistic, and emotionally impactful, but may feel a touch unsatisfying if your main goal in computer gaming is pure escapism. Other than walking around maps, training up stats, triggering events, and interacting with other characters the other main element of gamification here is the card system. As you experience the world you are rewarded with cards as a proxy for life’s experiences – such as “Hide and Seek with Nougat”, “Harvesting Mushwood” and “Dys's Secret”. The cards have one of three different colors, corresponding to broad stat building themes, and a number. Later events as you age inevitably reward cards with higher values. To pass a skill check you need to arrange your cards into straights and runs. The card system was more than complex enough for me as it gives a wonderful sense of agency, without being overly onerous or punishing. The tests are inevitably a reasonably straightforward exercise in pair matching and light mental arithmetic. Finally, I absolutely despise replaying most games - one run though of a game is inevitably enough. Except in this case, where I have completed three full runs and started a fourth. (A full run takes around 7 hours.) Exocolonist has a wonderful ability to encourage replayability. In part, this is because it is so content-dense that it is literally impossible to experience more than a fraction of what the game has to offer on a single playthough. The game also, very smartly, acknowledges the conceit with references to past (and future) lives and an end of game admonishment to “do better next time”. There is, indeed, a lot of incentive to do better next time, in part because bad things happen in the game to nice people, and across multiple replays you can find ways to save them and to improve the colony's chances of success. Taking certain routes through the story can also unlock additional story lines and options in future playthroughs. If you haven’t worked this out already, I cannot recommend this game highly enough.
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This game is good, but it really needs a primer, so I will give you one now: You will likely miss the entire game if you try to do everything. You really do need to commit to raising relationship with a couple of characters and spam them with gifts as often as you can to max them out, this isn't like Persona or Potionomics where you can easily see everything in a single playthrough. Also go exploring often, even to places you've already been, that's where a lot of the plot is hiding. Primer aside, it's a well-written game with a focus on relationships. It's like Persona, but with the novel conceit that you play a character from age 10-20 and very slowly grow up over the course of 20 or so realtime hours. It's also very queer, with nonbinary characters, a full playersexual cast of romance options, an ace/demi character and more.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 17 November 2024 18:04 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 20 December 2024 00:49 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 20:49 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 14:06 |
Online players
107
Developer
Northway Games
Publisher
Finji
Release
25 Aug 2022
Platforms