In this text based game you play as one of many children growing up on an alien planet, Earth's first space colony. The story follows the protagonist from age 10 to age 20 as you struggle to grow up, but also to survive. During each month you get to choose an activity to do and gain corresponding stats that unlock different dialogue choices. You can build your relations with the characters you grow up with and learn more about them by hanging out with them or giving them gifts. There are also card game challenges in which you use cards representing your memories to succeed in certain tasks.

This game is masterfully written. Your choices truly impact the story and world around you, including your choice to ignore something. There is so much lore and things to learn, not just about this unexplored planet, but also the group you came there with and what led you to leave earth. The many paths you can take will twist and turn and intersect in different ways and the game is designed for you to replay it and explore! During your playthrough you can notice how the writing changes to reflect your character's growing worldview and vocabulary. The game explores the whimsy of childhood but also pretty quickly tackles heavy themes and have many gut wrenching moments as well as thoughtful scenes and messages.

The characters are complex, multifaceted people that will grow alongside you and have their own arcs, even if you don't interact with them, making the world feel alive. You can eventually choose to romance characters but its worth noting that this is not a dating game. The relationships can be messy and lead to breakups depending on the character and your choices. Characters that are not dated can end up together or your actions can lead to another couple breaking up. But the relationships can of course also be incredibly sweet and heartwarming, its all a part of life!


The presentation is absolutely gorgeous. The music, the character art and the backgrounds are all stunning, words can't give them justice. All characters are well designed and expressive and the fully illustrated scenes are always a treat. The UI is nice and simple with an in universe reason to exist and you can change its transparency and size according to your needs. The artwork on the cards is pretty as well but can feel a little out of place sometimes since they where all made by different guest artists but that doesn't subtract from the overall feel of the watercolor style and synthetic tunes.

Character diversity is not a problem and the game is very inclusive. There is a broad range of people with different ethnicites, body types, mobility, gender and preferences, It never feels 'forced' or tokenized, everyone is just allowed to be their own people. You can choose, change and customize your gendered language at any time if you so wish, independent of appearance. Polyamory is possible with certain characters and you can date all the characters regardless of gender.

The game is also well optimized with many options to increase performance. Even though its already pretty light since its a text based game, its nice to see! I played this on a laptop at times and it ran smooth there as well aside from some minor problems with the cloud sync.



TL DR: I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is a beautiful and heavy story game with card based mini-challenges, deep lore, well developed characters, inclusivity and a lovely soundtrack.