I Was a Teenage Exocolonist on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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, life sim and deckbuilding 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 3,822 reviews of which 3,701 were positive and 121 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.3 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 24.50€ on Steam.
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.
System 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
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
If you're on the fence, even a little bit, just go for it. This game has everything: beautiful art, a touching, choices-matter story, excellent music, basically infinite replayability, like seriously, if you think you might like it you're already 80% of the way there. You'll love it. Play it. Thank me later.
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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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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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As a 50 year old woman I don't really think I'm the target audience for this game, but it's got me really invested. You can clearly tell this game was made with love, care and passion. The artwork is a feast for the eye. The story is very compelling and I fell in love with the characters. Definitely worth the buy!
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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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Last Updates| Steam data | 13 April 2025 19:06 |
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| SteamSpy data | 12 April 2025 04:57 |
| Steam price | 13 April 2025 20:48 |
| Steam reviews | 12 April 2025 12:07 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
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- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck I Was a Teenage Exocolonist compatibility
