I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a genre-defying life simulator having a literal twist over time.
You play as Sol, a child born 'among the stars' halfway via a 20-year voyage from Earth to some planet on the other hand of a wormhole close to the Milky Way. Arriving on Vertumna in your tenth birthday, the sport follows Sol over a decade of the teenage life, the course of which largely depends upon those things of the player. Because the playfully light novel-esque title suggests, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a game title as much about childhood because it is sci-fi fantasy.
The Bet on Life
Exocolonist is primarily a stats-based game; over the ten years of the game's story, Sol can develop their identity and skillset together with physical, mental and social abilities. Different life experiences award cards that represent individual memories, from winning a trivia competition to sneaking away from confines of the colony walls with your childhood friend. These cards form decking used to overcome various skill challenges via a poker-like mini game, but like Supergiant Games' Pyre, success during these challenges is not integral to completing the game.
Whether or otherwise Sol succeeds or fails simply nudges the narrative inside a different direction. Sol could lose every challenge in the game, and that itself will be a valid experience with I Would be a Teenage Exocolonist's story. Acquiring these cards through Sol's childhood experiences also lends a kind of nostalgic significance to every card, particularly at the start of the sport whenever your collection is small and each experience with Vertumna looms large in Sol's memory. As you progress through the game and acquire more experiences, the person significance of every memory lessens because they accumulate into the equivalent of a body of knowledge – the fruits of the life lived, in whatever form you're considering like a player.
I Would be a Teenage Exocolonist is a game that asks the player to reflect around the impact of humanity and technology around the environment, and Sol is regularly inspired to engage with the politics from the colony. Explained developer Sarah Northway as 'sort of a multinational hippie commune with a colony ship', the Vertumna colony is really a utopian project born of big dreams that also strays at different points towards capitalist and militaristic philosophical directions.
Exocolonist asks the gamer whether these malaises are inevitable, and reiterates that they're not, but you as the player need to make the work if you want to overcome them. Even if you try your very best to prevent doing anything more, Sol cannot escape as being a part of Vertumna and will always be looped into the fray, in one way or another.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist rarely enables you to exist like a passive citizen for very long.
The Art of Failure
One of the most compelling elements of the game is revealed gradually in an initial playthrough. Growing up, Sol is affected by strange dreams and visions, some of which seem prophetic and others that are disturbing and shadowy alternate histories. With time it becomes clear that these dreams are fragmented memories of various iterations of Sol's life.
Vertumna seems contained to a single instance of amount of time in which Sol exists, over and over, and is the only one (seemingly) who recalls each repetition with any clarity. Pursuing an answer to why this is occurring is a possible path Sol can follow, but they do not need to. Sol's visions are their memories of your alternate playthroughs, and just what you need to do in each can slightly alter the course of the next. That which you do in one life might change much now, but it might mean everything to the future.
I spent hours of my second playthrough working towards a specific goal – learning the source code of the ship's advanced AI, Congruence, so I could steer clear of the shields from failing. In the most effective outcome, losing hydroponics leads to famine. Having learned the source code, I booted up a brand new playthrough to excitedly see the different directions the sport usually takes, simply to laugh in shock. Sol could can remember the source code to the AI from their dreams but, obviously, was clueless that how to recalibrate the shields themselves – having never interacted with this area of the ship's engineering in a past life.
I've rarely felt such a feeling of amused delight and horror in an event in a game, to have something make this kind of obscene amount of logical sense – and be this type of reminder of my player hubris. How indeed could I learn to recalibrate the shields? The answer was even better – the only way Sol encountered the necessary knowledge about the shields from the Stratospheric was if Sol failed or ignored a path I had relentlessly pursued during my other playthroughs.
Sol needed to cumulatively experience failure and success to have the option to completely prevent food scarcity later on. Perhaps more powerfully, I needed to allow myself explore, try, and fail aspects of the game to know its story completely. For a lot of role-playing games I've played in the past, information was only revealed through 'correct' search for the game's world. That Exocolonist nudges you towards failure and makes failing a fundamental element of the knowledge seems a gesture that struck me as expressing something deeply about both the story I Was a Teenage Exocolonist wants to tell, and about the act of gameplay itself.
There is not a stated 'ideal' ending to Exocolonist, because all the endings happen, however the implication is that the ideal ending each player personally finds solace in is always and just a result of the trials and failures of all of the others.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist uses a moment intrinsic to experience, failure, to explore a concept about effort that seems particularly salient in the context of our present environmental moment. Concentrating on an individualistic experience of time isn't enough. Exocolonist values time on the grander scale – time where you plant the seeds you yourself won't ever see become trees – and points out the flaws and limitations of seeing your actions only poor a single lifetime. If Sol attempts to solve a problem now, even if they fail, the effort made is recognised and valued by another life.
The Human Experience
I Would be a Teenage Exocolonist is an intriguing game based on its clever and playful method of game design alone; using failure and repetition as essential and valuable components of what it really way to create a home, and also the effort to do it right. What makes it a great game is the brilliant writing of and interactions using its central cast of characters, predominantly comprised of other children born around the Stratospheric colony ship during its 20-year voyage. Each character serves as a microcosm of the game's broader philosophical questions regarding what's to be human and never human across numerous everyday interactions, deconstructing the idea of the human being in a way that makes Exocolonist a compellingly personal posthuman narrative.
Across all my playthroughs, some of the best interactions were with estranged twins Tangent and Dys. Divided following the lack of their mother at a early age, Tangent and Dys' experiences and storylines share similar beats, but engage in across vastly different spaces and experiences. All the kids of the Stratospheric who grew up alongside you have a genetic mutation that enhances their physical or mental capabilities but fundamentally alters their experience with the world. Many of these enhancements are subtle genetic shifts, instead of 'superhuman' abilities, and affect their experiences with an everyday (rather than grandiose) level. Tangent requires less sleep than a normal human, and Dys feels no fear. Being free of such deeply entrenched human experiences changes who and what Tangent and Dys are fundamentally. Who are we when we don't have to sleep? Shall we be human when we feel no fear?
Dys, particularly, experiences deep feelings of ostracisation from other members of the colony even as a young boy, and also the game subtly makes the player reflect on how much that is a result of the adult colonists unease with the uncanny child who is scared of nothing. In my playthrough, I came to feel it had been this unease with Dys' posthuman self (which the adults themselves created) that leads to parentless Dys' slipping with the cracks of the colony's social order.
Dys' lack of fear makes him less amenable to measures of control by fear – starting with 'harmless' ideas in childhood (such as 'the environment away from walls is dangerous, so you shouldn't go there') and more dramatic political efforts to control the population by fear within the colony's old age. For all their utopic dreams, the adults born on earth are unable to relinquish using fear as a method of control, but Dys always exists like a foil (albeit a recalcitrant and challenging one, for the player).
Invitation to Vertumna
I Would be a Teenage Exocolonist is a game filled with incredible love and joy because of its characters, the storyline it really wants to tell and also the artistic medium of the gaming. Its writing, art and music wondrously capture the concentration of childhood and of as being a teenager.
Simple, thoughtful touches which make the sport more pleasant and accessible are there for the player benefit without fanfare or fuss. For a game filled with intense and challenging personal experiences, there's a listing of warnings within the menu that may be viewed with and without narrative spoilers. It's not hard to change everything about your character's looks and gender at any time in play, the song and artist of each piece in the soundtrack is seen with the main menu, and you can alter the music at any time. The problem of the card-based mini-game can be changed at any point, as can the introduction of an autoplay feature that keeps the stat-based mechanic but permits the player to focus on the story (or play the game quicker, for those with limited time).
These small efforts to make the experience enjoyable mean the mechanics of the game receded as I played, allowing me to immerse myself in Exocolonist's narrative and philosophical reflections. I Would be a Teenage Exocolonist is a beautiful game, a synth-laden ode to growing up and allowing yourself to fall, fail, succeed and explore in a posthuman world that asks thoughtful questions about what it way to exist alongside the natural environment.
5 Stars: ★★★★★
I Would be a Teenage Exocolonist
Platforms: PC, Mac, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch
Developer: Northway Games
Publisher: Finji
Release Date: 25 August 2023
The Mac version of I had been a Teenage Exocolonist was played for that purpose of this review.
