My continuing adventures in visual novels and VN-adjacent games: I Was a Teenage Excolonist

I’ve been on a bit of a visual novel kick recently.

It started when a did a blog on a pervy gay visual novel I’d played about half a decade ago, which on balance was good but not great. I got a number of suggestions for other visual novels I could try in the comments, and ended up playing Our Life: Beginnings & Always, which I absolutely adored. I’d long been pretty dismissive of visual novels as simply not my jam, but Our Life forced me to admit that this isn’t actually true—I just hadn’t found the right one(s) yet. So I took note of yet more suggestions in the comments, added some games to various wishlists, and made up my mind to try more in this genre as time (and sales!) allowed.

The next one I tried, shortly after Our Life, was A Date with Death, which had the benefit of a very low barrier to entry—it was both free (albeit with paid DLCs) and short (about three hours). It was… okay. Not the worst way to spend three hours, but in the end it just wasn’t a game that grabbed me. Hey, they can’t all be home runs. In truth, Our Life ended up being so perfect for me that I’ll be surprised (very pleasantly so!) if I find a visual novel that surpasses it anytime soon.

After about a month of a return to some games that were more in my usual idiom—I played a lot of Diablo 4 in June—I Was a Teenage Exocolonist (recommended to me by @argentaurus) showed up in the Steam Summer Sale for 50% off ($12.50, normally $25). It was the game that had most caught my eye among the recommendations after Our Life, just from watching the gameplay trailer. So I went ahead and bought it and jumped right in.

If you want my quick and dirty opinion of whether this game is worth a purchase here at the top after a single twenty-hour playthrough, before I delve into the details, the answer is yes, this game is definitely worth your time. It’s an intriguing combination of elements and has some genuinely creative ideas. Predominantly a visual novel, it also includes a simple card game/deck-builder and some light social sim elements having to do with raising twelve character stats (empathy, reasoning, courage, etc.), managing a stress meter, and raising friendship levels with other characters. Its strongest aspect is its narrative, which its various gameplay elements seem designed to enhance without being so complicated as to become distracting.

While it’s not a perfect game (arguably nothing ever really is), taken as a whole package it’s an impressive achievement, and I actually find myself a little baffled that it’s not better known, since it seems pretty broadly appealing. Perhaps the fact that it’s a pretty “lefty” game hurt it too much amongst the ascendant anti-pronoun crowd to fully break into the mainstream. Who knows. Whatever the reason(s) may be, I hope that it might eventually find a larger audience.

Beginnings

The game opens with you as a ten-year-old, born on Earth’s first colony ship travelling to another planet to escape earth’s troubles. Your choices start with character creation… of a sort. It’s not a game that lets you fully customize your character’s look—you always have mid-tone skin and multi-colored blue-and-yellow hair—but you can pick your name, appearance (either feminine, androgynous, or masculine), and pronouns (either she/her, they/them, he/him, or custom pronouns).

Both the appearance and pronoun selection can be changed at any time, even mid-game, and that’s largely because they make very little difference. Your “appearance” selection actually only affects the length of your hair in your late teen years, and while the game dutifully inserts your desired pronouns into its text, your apparent gender has almost no effect on the story or gameplay at all. It’s seldom acknowledged by anyone, and you’re able to romance whoever you please regardless; this is not a game that is especially concerned about the “canonical” sexual orientations of its NPCs, though many of them will enter into romantic relationships with other characters if they’re not in one with you.

Anyway, the more important character creation choices, gameplay-wise, are picking a starting genetic enhancement (which provides faster stat growth in a particular skill area) and a childhood friend (which gives you an early relationship boost with them). There’s an additional choice or two to make if you’ve already cleared the game once (this is a game that really wants you to play it multiple times… I’ll get to that). Those choices out of the way, the game begins with your ship arriving at the destination planet, where the work of colonizing gets underway.

Gameplay elements and systems

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is predominantly a game about how you spend your time and what narrative choices you make. Structurally, it’s split into ten years (until you reach age 20), each with thirteen months. Each month you get to pick a single major activity, which can range from attending various classes (on engineering, biology, or humanities, etc), to helping manage domesticated animals, to combat training, to exploring the alien wilderness, among others.

All of these besides planetary exploration give you point gains to your various skills, plus “kudos” (the game’s currency… the name makes me smile), and often deepen your relationship with one or more characters. The amount of skill points and kudos you gain often depends on your performance in a “card challenge.” You can either fail, win, or hit the “super goal”… which is to say that you managed to hit a higher hidden point total and get bonus rewards. All of these activities add to your stress meter, and when you hit 100 stress, you’re required to take a month off to rest and recharge (wouldn’t it be wonderful if the real world worked that way, eh?).

In between doing activities that make time pass, you can wander around your small colony and interact with people. Optional dialogue will sometimes pop up that has to do with the game’s larger narrative, but more often you’ll see conversations that happen as a result of deepening your relationship with someone. All of your romanceable contemporaries have a friendship meter that can be raised from 0 to 100, and there are break points along the way that advance their character story. The main way to raise your friendship levels is giving gifts, which requires you figuring out what presents each colonist likes best, and also when it’s best to give it to them (you get bonus points for giving someone a gift on their birthday, but you don’t know birthdays by default, unless you look them up).

Choosing to explore the alien wilderness is a little bit different. You’re put on a simple field with various resources to gather which can act as one-time enhancements to your cards or given as gifts. The field is split up by “encounters”—ranging from fighting the alien fauna to traversing an obstacle, most of which trigger a card challenge—each of which adds to your stress. When you reach max stress, you’re forced to return to the colony.

Finally, a word about how the card game works. It’s really a very simple and straightforward card game as far as these things go. You play hands of three to five cards that give points for their face value, plus bonus points for straights, flushes (cards are split into three “suits” based on the game’s three skill types), and pairs, and if you reach the prescribed point total, you win, while exceeding it by a hidden amount gets you bonus rewards. That’s it. And while cards do have various effects that change how each plays (like a card doubling its point value if played in the first or last slot), overall the card challenges are pretty breezy.

I think that pretty much covers the broad strokes of how Exocolonist’s various systems work, so it’s time to start looking at them a bit more closely and do some analysis and criticism.

A game that’s meant to be replayed

I’m not sure that I’ve ever played a game that’s quite as thirsty for you to replay it as this one. And it’s not just that it taunts you at the end with an “endings gallery” that shows a whole lot of blanks for endings you haven’t got and cards that you never acquired, with a big button that says “Start your new life.” It’s also that they’ve done something unique and creative with the narrative.

If you play through a scene again that you’ve already seen before, then your character will often have a memory of it, a sort of precognition, that unlocks new options. It’s possible, for instance, for a major character to die, and yet on second play your character will remember what happened, and be given an option that will save them. This is already a pretty neat idea, but the thing that really astonished me and made me smile about it is that it also works with save scumming during your first play. That’s right, you can play a scene through, reload your game, and already have new options from your character’s weird extra-dimensional perception. I can’t think of any other game that does anything like this.

It's part of why even though I spent a little over 20 hours playing Exocolonist until credits rolled, in a lot of ways I feel like a single play actually isn’t enough to give me the whole picture. After I finished I took a look at the achievements and noticed that there was one for getting “all 29 endings.” Knowing that I probably wasn’t going to play again soon, but wanting to have a better sense of other ways things could have played out, I looked up a list of the endings. And while, as you might expect, a lot of these “29 endings” are just you finishing the game with one career or another, there are about half a dozen endings that are wildly different conclusions to the colony’s fate as a whole than the one I got. Seeing that list and looking at the basics of what’s needed to achieve each made me appreciate it even more in retrospect; I hadn’t realized before then just how much I’d missed.

Progression frustrations

That said, there were times when it felt like Exocolonist was being unnecessarily opaque about certain things. For instance, I’m sort of OK that I never ended up meeting an important NPC outside the colony at all, which required several fleeting encounters during exploration in which you half-glanced a shadowy figure (I half-saw him twice and apparently needed to do so three times, I guess?). I am less OK with the game effectively hiding the unlocking of various colony facilities and activities behind requirements that I couldn’t possibly have guessed without looking them up.

This happened with a couple of colony facilities that, as far as I know, were the only two ways to quickly raise your Empathy skill. Doing so is important because the first Empathy “perk” (each of the twelve skills has three perks that unlock at 33, 66, and 100 points) allows you to pay kudos to remove cards from your deck—the only reliable way in the game to do so. Like pretty much any card-builder, you end up with a lot of weaker cards that dilute the power of your deck throughout the game, and because I missed a simple but obscure requirement for unlocking both facilities, I never had the chance to remove cards from my deck until literally the last year (out of ten) in the game.

One other thing about skills and perks: they feel pretty wildly unbalanced. The perks can be as lame as the second one for Creativity, which gives a 5% chance of an extra skill point gain, or as ridiculously overpowered as the third and final one for Perception, which lets you skip over exploration encounters entirely and gather resources unhindered without accumulating any stress. Moreover, many skills will see almost no use throughout the game… until at the end it gives you a situation in which a max of 100 in a certain skill is required, while 99 will fail out. I dunno, man. This does not feel great.

There are simple things that the game could have done to address some of these problems. They could have added some sort of indicator/exclamation mark to facilities where one-time events that unlock important things had become newly available. That it doesn’t do anything like this, not to mention give me any indication of which skills kinda suck and which ones don’t, actually made me wish I’d looked at a few very basic guides and wikis beforehand, just so I had a better idea of what to prioritize and wouldn’t miss some of the important elements that should have been more obvious. I guess it’s another reason to do a second playthrough, but I don’t think that’s a good excuse for how easily missable some of this stuff is.

Card game? What card game?

The game’s lack of attention to such details is partly explained by the fact that it’s so focused on creating a great branching narrative that it doesn’t seem to take its own gameplay systems all that seriously, which has both benefits and drawbacks.

On the one hand, if you’re looking for a robust deck-building game, Exocolonist really isn’t it. The card challenges are simple and easy, and, as illustrated above with the whole card removal thing, the game isn’t really interested in making sure you have robust tools to manage your card deck. More than that, card challenges can actually be disabled entirely. Doing so will forfeit your ability to meet card challenge “super goals” and hence your skill point growth might be slower, so I’m not sure I’d actually recommend it, but nonetheless it’s an option that’s there if you want it. Were it not for leaving some skill points on the table, it’s one I’d strongly consider myself.

And to be fair, personally I’m glad that the card game was pretty much of a simple and breezy pushover. If you’re someone who groans at the idea of yet another deck-building game (there sure are a lot of them out there these days!), well, don’t worry about it, it’s not really that big a deal. The game itself doesn’t think so, either.

Walkin’ around

Exocolonist put me in mind of Persona 3 for a very specific reason.

I first played Persona 3: FES on Playstation 2, and it featured fully 3D environments for all the social areas that you could walk around in with your 3D character avatar. But when the game was re-released on the PSP as Persona 3 Portable, it jettisoned the 3D environments for everything except the dungeons, and you instead moved around the non-dungeon areas simply by selecting from menus that took you from one static backdrop to another.

At the time I remember missing those 3D environments. It felt like they gave you a sense of place that the static backdrops and menus couldn’t. And yet after playing Exocolonist, I’m left with the opposite thought: I’m not sure that its 3D environments really need to be there.

For one, they simply… don’t look that great? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the 3D areas aren’t ugly, they’re just a bit mediocre and unimpressive. They use 2D sprites on extremely simple 3D geometry that does, I suppose, provide a kind of retro feel for those people who are nostalgic about that sort of thing, but on the whole it all feels functional and not much more.

This is in contrast, I rush to note, to the large 2D portraits that pop up during all conversations, which all have a lot of character and look quite good. Exocolonist is certainly not a bad-looking game overall, but the 3D overworld parts are pretty undoubtedly the least attractive part of it, and I can’t help but think that there were other ways to accomplish what the 3D portions of the game give you, mechanics-wise.

Repetition

Moreover, as far as the 3D elements go, it doesn’t help that most of the stuff you find yourself doing wandering around your colony or the alien planet’s wilderness is fairly boring and, notably for a game that hangs its hat on its writing, repetitive.

For instance, there are a limited number of “encounters” written for each alien wilderness area, and if you go out into a given area more than once (which is a requirement for a lot of the different endings), you will see the exact same encounters numerous times, and they always play out exactly the same way. Oh, look, a floatcow in distress (yes, there are things called “floatcows” in this game, and they are exactly what you think they are, and I am here for it); I already know from doing this three times previously that if I help it by doing X thing I will get +2 to “animal” skill, etc. And repetition for a visual novel game is… not ideal. That repetition makes the exploration and resource-gathering portions feel like a bit of a slog.

The whole aspect of gift-giving is in a certain sense even more repetitive, which is an especial pity given that it is such a key tool in boosting your friendship status with the other colonists. You can give everyone at least two gifts a year—one on their birthday and one at a random time. Since each colonist has only a couple of items that are their favorite gift, you’ll probably be giving those same gifts ten or twenty times over the course of the game, and their response dialogue is always the same. Apparently all these people are exactly as happy and surprised about getting this same gift from you for the tenth time as they were the first time.

Frankly, the whole gift system and trying to remember every character’s birthday all the time felt like lame checklisty busywork, and as a result I ended up engaging with it a lot less than I should have, and by the end of the game I had only raised three NPCs to max friendship. For a game that focuses so much on narrative and relationships, there had to have been better, more organic ways to increase those friendship meters than continuing to butter NPCs up with the same couple of gifts over and over and over again.

Of characters and caricatures

I said at the outset that Exocolonist’s strongest aspect was its narrative. But narrative is distinct from characters, and though the writing in Exocolonist is generally quite strong, I do have a broad criticism that applies to a lot of its characterization.

I want to be careful with this because, as mentioned previously: (1) I only played the game once when the creators clearly intend you to play it multiple times, and (2) I only maxed three relationships by the end of the game, and it’s reasonable to expect that characters will become more well-rounded as you get to know them better. So I consider my overall take on this aspect to be fairly incomplete and possibly skewed by too small a sample size. Nonetheless…

Writing good characters is hard, and there are a couple of opposing traps that writers can find themselves falling into.

On the one hand, a single writer can easily find their characters too undifferentiated, all sounding like essentially the same person, because (after all) it was the same person who wrote them all from start to finish, and they simply weren’t able to fully empathize enough with varying emotional perspectives and reactions in order to make numerous characters that actually feel authentically real and distinct. They all end up just sounding like the writer themselves.

On the other hand, writers who are really focused on making their characters distinct can end up running straight into the beckoning arms of tried-and-true character archetypes. They grab an existing character mould from the cultural ether (unconsciously or not) and then plug that archetype into their specific narrative, imagining how that archetype would react to the narrative situation.

From my time with the game, I’d say that Exocolonist often suffers a bit from this second sort of problem. It’s not that the characters are bad, precisely, yet I can’t help but feel that I’ve already met most of them many times before in many other places, and, moreover, that they never actually change all that much.

Exhibit A is probably Dys, who I picked as my childhood friend at the opening of the game. Dys is a broody loner emo kid. He is exactly the character you think he is, right down to his appearance, with his dark hair and clothing. Moreover, I think it says everything you need to know about Dys that his name is a shortened form of “Dysthymia,” which is more commonly known as “persistent depressive disorder.” That’s right, his very name even means “persistently depressed.” Dys himself even makes a joke about it at one point (and a game taking time out to point out its own cleverness about such things is often a bad sign). Anyway, he is a loner emo kid at the start of the game and a loner emo young adult at the end of the game.

For whatever it’s worth, this whole “extremely obvious character archetype” thing does seem to have been at least somewhat intentional by the designers, since literally every character has a full name that’s a little goofy and makes some meta-commentary on their characterization or role. For instance, there’s a girl who goes by “Tammy,” whose full name is “Aspartame” (an artificial sweetener), and she is unsurprisingly sweet, with her defining characteristic being her love of babies and her desire to become a mother. You’ve also got an aunt who goes by the name “Auntie Seedent”, whose real name is “Antecedent,” and do I really need to explain that one?

For what it’s worth, besides Dys, the two characters that I maxed out at 100 friendship were Rex and Tangent.

Rex, who I ended up romancing, is a dog boy who is constantly cheerful and upbeat and enjoys playing fetch, giving and receiving hugs, and… well… getting frisky (and polyamorous). He is the easy-going horndog of the cast, and while he doesn’t share much in common with Dys, one thing he does share is that he really doesn’t feel any different at the end than he did at the beginning.

Tangent, Dys’s sister, is the sciency one, the kid genius obsessed with science as the vehicle for solving all of humanity’s problems. Of the three characters I maxed out on friendship, she was the one who I felt at least had a somewhat more developed arc and had noticeably changed by the end of game.

Maybe a lot of the other characters that I spent less time with have more developed arcs, more like Tangent and less like Dys and Rex. I really just don’t know.

There is one other character that I want to mention as being problematic in a slightly different way than the others. Her name is Marz (short for “Marzipan”), and she is repeatedly cited by every other character in the game as being a natural leader and the most likely to eventually become the colony’s next governor. The funny thing about that is that this assessment seems wildly inconsistent with everything I ever saw about her character. She seemed to spend most of her time bullying people, making jokes at others’ expense, and occasionally stealing shit for her own comfort.

I dunno, maybe this is supposed to be a metacommentary on our contemporary political leaders, or is designed to push you toward trying to become the colony’s governor yourself just to avoid the prospect of a Marz-led colony (which is what I ended up doing), but it felt pretty bizarre for her to continually be such as asshole through basically the entire game and yet everyone just kept talking about what a great leader she was. Big disconnect there.

But no, seriously, this is a good game, though

I’ve just spent a couple of thousand words going into fairly exacting detail about what I regard as some of Exocolonist’s weaknesses and failings. It’s probably a moral failing of mine that I often find it easier to dwell disproportionately on criticisms while breezing past the more positive elements. When you like something, sometimes it can be hard to say anything much beyond “I loved it, no notes!”, while even the small negatives stick in your brain.

(Also, spoilers are a problem. I keep saying the narrative is its strongest feature, but the last thing you want to do in reviewing a narrative-focused game is spoil the story, so there’s only so much I can do to praise that part of it. I guess that’s one of the challenges of reviewing visual novels.)

Which is all to say that you shouldn’t take any of my criticisms above too seriously. I wouldn’t put this much time into criticizing a thing that I care nothing about; I criticize because I love. And truthfully, none of the weaknesses I cite are ruinous; they are simply a little less than ideal. And as mentioned near the top, the game itself seems very aware of where its own strengths lie; the fact that you are able to skip the card game aspect entirely and that the skill metaprogression often matters less than you probably think it does, ultimately shows that the devs’ hearts and focus are in the right place.

As a story, it took some truly unexpected turns and really went some places, though I’m not going to tell you what they are, for obvious reasons. And especially from my postgame reading about what other sorts of endings are possible, there’s definitely enough there to keep you going back for a long time. It’s a game that rewards poking and prodding at it… even poking and prodding of the save-scumming variety. “Genius” is an overused superlative, but the whole “you remember events from your past playthroughs” thing really does seem like a stroke of genius to me. I don’t think I’ll play this game again right away, but I can definitely see myself coming back to it again in a couple of months or so. It certainly does its best to keep drawing you back in.

I should also mention that, beyond endings, important differences can happen in the early and mid game that affect the entire run, including important characters (even romanceable ones) dying in the first few years. In my own run a couple of important characters died, including one who I initially thought probably wasn’t actually save-able, and yet in my postgame reading I discovered that you actually can save them. Again, oh. Your choices, and your past memories, really do matter.

Anyway, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is on sale on Steam for $12.50 through July 10^th, roughly another week. If you’re into intriguing, leftie, slightly horny sci-fi visual novels with robust branching narratives and some light deck-builder and social sim elements (seriously, what a weird but cool combination), then you should consider picking this one up. It ain’t perfect, but its strengths easily outweigh its minor blemishes.