I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

*This is more of a mixed review than a positive one* This game has been a very weird journey. Ultimately, I guess I liked it, or at least liked half of my first run, but I feel there's a lot I'm still missing on and I don't feel I like it enough to pursue every possible possibility I could, which makes me a little sad. This is way more of a "mixed" review than a truly positive one, but I ended up deciding to go for recommending this game because I did enjoy it a lot in the beginning, and spent hours playing it. I might update this review in the future if I end up playing more routes and enjoying it more, but for now it's going to be a "I liked it, but..." kind of review. At first, I expected this to be a dating sim about exploring different planets and meeting aliens and their culture in each of them. Now, of course, I know it's about the life of a single teenager who goes with his community to a planet, and has the option of dating some of these people. I also know it's way more about the world around the MC and the whole community (not just the dateable options): The life sim aspect of it. Although I liked the story (mostly until year 5, it went a little downhill after that) and was curious about it, after getting my first ending, my gas kind of run off. I spent around 14 to 15 hours in my first run. Liked the card game aspect of it, was curious about the world and was not so satisfied with my dating option (Tang), but I stuck with my early decision. Regarding the story, I was mildly satisfied, regarding the dating sim aspect, not so much. There weren't many moments with Tang and the MC, just the two of them, and even though we got to dating, it didn't really feel like dating at all. Unless you go to Tang and ask her to go on a date with you, the rest of the game remains exactly the same. Dating her, at least as far as I know, didn't change anything around you, the way she treated you during events, classes or other stuff. Now, I know this is a long game already, but I feel like it really needed that. There's at least 9 direct romance options (others might show up as well), so not feeling being together with them makes a real change really bothers me. If there were idk, two, and the bigger focus was on the story, okay, sure, but that's not the case. The dating aspect being so little was probably my biggest problem with the game, to be honest. It was very unsatisfying. This and the fact that, after starting my second run and doing some things right (that I previously did wrong) I realized to date all of the characters, I'd have to replay and do all of them 9+ times. And I didn't even get the real, great, amazing ending with Tang the first time (it's apparently hard), so even more than that. This is a game about building your skills and interacting with the world around you, so you cannot skip anything. You gotta replay from scratch every time, with some very minors helps here and there that replaying it gives. Going back to the dating aspect of it, this might sound a little "selfish"?, but being used to traditional dating games, it felt very weird that the characters would have set dating lives around you before you even chose a partner. It's one of those "the world goes on without you" vibes, but... I have to separate a couple to be with one of them? I have to rush and date them as soon as possible or they'll get with someone else? I'm all for the polygamy characters and this aspect of them, but seeing the girl I've been giving 2000 quartz to and have a friendship level very high flirting with a new guy as soon as he shows up doesn't really make me very excited. I guess if we spent more time together after dating or we had more moments it'd be good, but since it's not the case, then it just sucks. I felt the game was a little repetitive too, even though it was just my second run. Having to go on the explorations to fix stuff in the colony (when you already know everything you'll encounter and the outcome to them) feels too much like a task, and not a "yay! let's fix this!". My mentality was positive until I had to go on explorations and redo stuff. So yeah, I did have some fun with my first playthrough, but the game is way bigger than that (which I guess it's the reason for the high price), but it's not engaging enough for me to play it. I still think it's worth to grab if it has a discount or something to experience the story, but only if you're not primarily interested in the dating aspect of it. If you are, then maybe this game isn't for you, because that's really not the main focus. I really liked that it talks a lot about nature, colonization, diversity and culture, and I think going through the story at least once is worth it, if you're interested in stories like that. Maybe it's not worth the price to just play it once, though, so have it in mind.

In a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you... - Sol, probably, trying to explain the constant dreaming about the perfect polycule that her, Dys and Sym could create.

感觉……不好玩…… 科幻+恋爱+卡牌的rpg，原因并非是lgbt元素（反而是吸引我的地方），只是文本描写不怎么吸引我且刷数值流程有点枯燥，卡牌的系统也很简单没什么难度，不如说就是前期白板卡牌太多形不成combo所以有点无聊，地图也简单体量小，玩了一个半小时，没感觉有什么乐趣，但因为key很便宜加上新出了民汉补丁所以玩一玩也没什么，纯粹个人方面没get到，不推荐

This is genuinely one of the best written games ever. I love this game and I think about the world and its characters often.

I know my review will be looked over since I've played it years late after it's come out, but I couldn't help myself. So I'm reviewing it anyways because this game sticks with you. It's been a few days after I've played it and I still can't get it out of my head. So I know I need to say something about it. lol. This game is a masterpiece at a choices matter type of game. I got it on a whim a months ago because it looked interesting. After I got it, I had someone say it was super sad, so then I held off from playing it for months. Honestly, that was the biggest mistake I make, because wow, just wow. This game not only breaks your heart and hurts, but it also gives you hope for the next life playthrough. I think the worst part is after you play it, your little brain will come up with its own scenarios of what-if's. XD (That might be a me thing). Then you play it again and pray you do something right and fix something so the timeline won't be broken. Pros- - The writing. The characters and story is really good. I could imagine mc as it's own character. So it wasn't me but another character interacting in the world. So even characters I didn't like, I sort of roleplayed as my character liking. (not me) - Yes, the game can be sad, but more in a broken hearted and stunned for 5 minutes because of a dire event type of sad. I was calling it Organ Trail in space to my friends while I was playing. Haha, I call this a pro since it can really shake you and make you work hard to achieve a better ending in the next playthrough. Also it feels realistic in a sci fi realistic way. Love that. <3 - Endings really hit hard. ദ്ദി╥ ᴗ ╥) It might be a few pages of writing but, oh my lord, I'm dying on the inside from the outcome from my choices. Sometimes for better, sometimes for the worst. - You can date all genders. (Men, women, non binary, other) You can also customize you character to be any gender and any body type with their gender. Really nice. - Each playthrough you can change change, gender, body, etc... so you aren't stuck as one body type through all your playthroughs. Cons- some of it can feel a little repetitive. (Dialogue/events/etc) There's no way to really avoid that. Overall, this game really is something special. I know after I got an ending I was happy with, I refused to touch it again because of how much it hurt to get an ending I didn't like or an event that could happen that would break me. Haha, call me soft, but it could really shock you to your core at points when you think that you've already hit rock bottom in the game. Don't worry, when you think that you've adverted a crisis, the game will make sure to show another emergency and claw into your heart when you think you have all the answers to a better future. As for favorite characters, I think all of them have their merits. There weren't any I was personally attached to until I finished my first playthrough. Then as I changed event outcomes, different characters lives, and learned more about them, the more I liked them. So now I'm a little in the air, since all of them have a different place in my heart after learning their secrets during the good and bad times.

Highly, highly, highly recommend this game. I may have gotten the worst ending, but I can only blame myself. The characters are fun to speak to, the grief is real, and the overall concept of a left-wing commune type of people fleeing Earth to colonize another planet and dealing with the inherent contradictions of colonization for survival while exploiting and harming the environment makes for an interesting and thought-provoking story line. This is one I'll probably let sit for a while and then go back to play through and try to get a better ending.

This game is a very interesting case. It fails utterly as a game that tells a compelling, responsive story; but it is incredibly successful as a kind of an incremental game where you see numbers go up and ‘collect’ valuable resources—endings—through those numbers. Unfortunately, that is not the type of game that I was seeking for. Initially, I was enamoured with the game and its premise, and the first loss that most of players experience hit me like a truck—to an extent that my partner came in to ask me why I was crying in the middle of the day. As I progressed through the story, though, I realised that every other loss (and major plot point) is basically dictated by very arbitrary factors that are meant to be accounted for in your future playthroughs, and not by decisions that make sense for your given character. That makes sense in a way that you play as a character that is meant not to dwell on any particular ‘life’ but instead engage them on a meta-level, but practically that just means that you are effectively detached from any events that happen in any given life; any hardships ring hollow and ultimately do not matter. All of that creates an incredibly ‘gamey’ feel to the way you interact with the game, turning every character into just a bunch of numbers—and a stepping stone towards a desired outcome. It’s an interesting peek into the way an immortal entity might have interacted with the world, but ultimately it’s an incredibly cold, calculated and pointless experience that is, to my mind, at odds with the vulnerable, earnest and caring promise of the beginning of the game. The thing that corroded the experience even further is that the story (probably because of the focus on the meta-progress) is written in a very limited way, that is quickly revealed if you zero-in on a particular archetype, making it obvious that the game has a very particular idea of what should happen—and is very blind to things that fall outside of that, to an extent that borders on ridiculous. For instance, one of my playthroughs was with an incredibly combat-oriented character (Physical stats maxed out, consistently out to protect the colony in the Glow, a sworn-in member of the garrison and ultimately the second in command). Yet, right till the end of the game, every time I chose to fight in the Glow, the game treated it as a surprise (“what? you want to defend the walls? well, you can try…”) despite this being my literal job in the colony at this point—so the game simply could not account for a very basic choice, making the holes in the story ever more visible. Another fun example is the event in the Swamps where you run into a vat-grown Faceless with Vance. Despite the fact that I effectively defeated three fully grown Faceless monsters in the past, one of them on my lonesome own, and also beat Vance in every possible contest at this point, the game completely disregarded all of that lived-in story to describe our characters to be “frozen in fear” (at the weakened inactive juvenile Faceless, mind you) and offered my battle-hardened shotgun-on-legs of a girl only two options: grab Vance and run away… or plead with Vance out of all people so that he could kindly allow me to fight on his side (which I hilariously couldn’t even do because my Persuasion wasn’t high enough—specifically because I went in on Physical stats). I burst out laughing at this point. Combine this story blindness/linearity with the focus on the meta-layer, and you get “I Was a Teenage Exocolonist.” I really really really wanted to like this game. Even after becoming disillusioned with the way it works, I pushed as far as I could to give it a fair assessment. Ultimately, though, this is not a game that I can recommend.

This is a very, very, VERY niche 1P social game where you play a 10yo growing up on an alien planet. There's 12 or 13 turns a year for at most 10 years. There's not many characters to interact with. There is SOME looking into alien animals, but there's really no exploring, no base building, no taking safety precautions, no .. nothing, really. After the game gets going MAYBE one character will have something new to say each month. You get to raise maybe 4 of 12 skills (very slowly) with a couple extra events helping with a skill point here and there. There are "cards" used for skill challenges, but you have almost ZERO ability to manage them - you're allowed to delete one card (from THEIR choice of 2) every couple months but ONLY if you rest and don't take other actions that month. By 13 you'll have over 2 dozen cards between the 3 colors (corresponding to skill groups) and there's virtually no way to tune your deck. The UI is poor with no way to back out of several actions once you click something, you MUST hover over skills to see their numeric values... When you can move your character around, think a flatter version of any 2D-on-(2D as 3D) surface. Keep an eye open for the one foragable item per month - if it even exists. The art style is about the only positive thing here, in a game with extremely little agency yet putting you in situations where you've no clue how you stack up to what is going on - and it is very possible to have unwinnable challenges at the default difficulty, usually resulting in a wasted month. The few story elements which are included aren't even guaranteed to happen in order - or at least not on sequential months (the only time unit). There are deaths,but there are so few characters in the game that if this was a real colony, it would die out in the first year. I have no clue if they're the same deaths every time, but I have to expect so given the inclusion in the dialog trees. Over all... this is a simple and simplistic game which will likely not make sense to other players in story or UI ways, but maybe the pretty art style and almost constant gender-fluidity will make that irrelevant for you. My suggestions is to buy only if you like really slow and REALLY dialog-heavy games (but you don't have to remember anything), and then only if it is 75% off or so.

I played one run and didn't care for the exploration mechanics, the grindy life-sim stat boosting, or the writing. It was bad enough trying to collect things to give away, but the game expects you to replay it over and over. The card game got old quickly too and the ending I had was a letdown. I just didn't care for the characters, none of the romantic options have interesting endings. The characters were forgettable and lacked personality even though half of them behaved like sociopaths. In fact, to romance half of them you can't be nice and supportive or you'll lose friendship points. Instead the game expects you to be a jerk and mistreat them...Hardly any of the characters are just available to date even if you've flirted with them from the start. No, you can't give constructive criticism or support anyone but have to manipulate nearly everyone to just to get romance. The game is so cynical in that none of the romanceable characters seem to want real love. Nearly the only healthy relationships in the whole game are with the parental figures who the game threatens to kill off for cheap emotional drama. Nearly everyone you can date is in a toxic pre-existing relationship and doesn't want to be with you resulting in NTR, and you don't "win them over" by showing you want to make them better, but instead by urging them to settle for you. (I'll only black out the names to avoid spoilers.) You have to tell [spoiler] Tang [/spoiler] to neglect her body and keep working herself to exhaustion for her to respect you a little, but then she'll still have flings with other people. You have to gaslight [spoiler] Tammy [/spoiler] and lower her confidence so she goes after you instead of [spoiler] Cal [/spoiler] who she loves. Or do the opposite for [spoiler] Cal's [/spoiler] route and tell him that [spoiler] Tammy [/spoiler] isn't in love with him even though she has liked him since they were kids in order for him to decide to be miserable and settle for you. You have to tell [spoiler] Anemone [/spoiler] to breakup with her boyfriend to be with either of them because half of the relationships in the game are just NTR. Even if you want to date [spoiler] Marz [/spoiler] who is shameless sociopath, she'll still go after two other people. If you go for [spoiler] Syn [/spoiler] you still have to share him with the unstable emo kid. And if you like the emo kid you can't fix him, but have to pander to his self-destructive tendencies and affirm that his murderous and suicidal outlook is the best. No one loves you enough and you're nearly everyone's second choice! It makes me wonder about what kind of unhealthy love life the writers might have had? Crappy writing aside, the aesthetic of the character design was also very bland. Even the number of sprites for different characters was very limited and hardly changed when you talked to them, and they wear pretty much the same expression for the entire game. Usually a bland smile, unless it's one of the girls who scowls all the time or the emo kid, they all seemed to only have one expression. There is hardly any emoting at all. There also weren't any really interesting scenes that were romantic, cute, sexy, or just memorable. The "dating" felt so half-baked and was a waste of time. Interacting with other characters was so boring that I'd rather they had either cut the hack-eyed romance, and just removed dating from the game to focus entirely on writing just one element well like making it a political simulator or a sci-fi adventure story. The game taunts you with the promise of alternate endings, but they still feel nearly the same, and the sum of your actions essentially don't effect your choices in the final conflict. The game seems to promise that your actions could make a difference, but it's just a thin illusion and it's a bait and switch compared to other visual novels where you can actually go onto very different branches. Because I liked completing visual novels I still went back and tried a couple more runs with a walkthrough to do more exploring and finish the game more completely. However, I got bored enough in the second run that I just couldn't stand it any longer and needed use debug mode to get through some of the late game tedium even if it meant missing some things. (Except that debug mode is very glitchy and tends to skip flags and lock you out of content.) Even if you disable the boring card game you're still stuck waiting for a lot of obnoxious animations to finish to pass checksums. Did I mention that the user interface really sucks compared to most visual novels? You can't even hold down the control button to fast forward through text like in nearly every visual novel, but must click on the screen or use a toggle in the menu to skip previously read text when you just want immediate control over your reading speed. There is an overmap, and you're expected to run back and forth through a labyrinth of paths with invisible walls collecting things on the ground that respawn constantly to give to about a dozen people basically every month if you want to get the best possible ending. There isn't a system to discourage you from playing like you have OCD. If you have any FOMO then the temptation to pick up every collectable you see, check a character's likes and birthdays, and constantly gift them for more friendship points is an unrewarding chore that will especially make you hate the game. (Which is why you owe it to yourself to turn on the debug mode if you play a second run.) Despite the tedious map traversal system I ran around outside the colony and found most of the secrets in my second run, but I have to warn the reader that it wasn't worth the work. My opinion was still unchanged from the first run. In fact, I found the game, characters, and the endings to be even more shallow and "samey." I thought maybe I had just chosen an undeveloped route, but they're all that lackluster. You can easily spend hours tediously repeating a run and it would only change a page or two of insignificant flavor text about who you romanced in the ending. It is quite unlike in many Japanese visual novels where simply choosing another choice or a character can lead to the reward of reading a ten minute epilogue that would have different sprites to look at. This is a game whose juice isn't worth the squeeze. If you are into sci-fi there are many visual novels that are more rewarding.