I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

Growing up is an exercise in resource management, though we rarely view our formative years through such a cold, analytical lens. Youth is spent trading time for skills, relationships for perspective, and innocence for survival. Northway Games, published by the narrative-focused Finji, has taken this metaphorical grind and manifested it as a sprawling, watercolor-soaked sci-fi epic. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, released August 25, 2022 for $24.99 on Steam and Nintendo Switch, is a sophisticated interrogation of how memory shapes identity, set against the backdrop of humanity’s first extrasolar colony, Vertumna.

The game places you in the role of a ten-year-old arrival on a planet that is as vibrant as it is hostile. Over the next decade, you navigate the friction of colonial politics, the terror of alien biology, and the agonizingly slow burn of puberty. This is a crowded market—sitting somewhere between the rigorous stat-management of Princess Maker and the branching narrative ambition of 80 Days—yet Exocolonist carves out a unique position by making its narrative permutations feel genuinely earned. With over 800 story events and nearly 30 distinct endings, the scope is staggering. However, the true achievement here isn’t the volume of content, but the mechanical ludonarrative. Your memories are your deck. Every traumatic event, every hard-won lesson, and every fleeting crush is added to your hand as a literal card. It is a brilliant bit of skeuomorphism for the soul, turning the ephemeral nature of a protagonist’s growth into a tangible, strategic resource.

• The Memory Deck: A card-based system where “cards” represent your character’s life experiences. Combat and social interactions are resolved through poker-style hand building using these memories.
• Temporal Persistence: A poignant time-loop mechanic that allows players to carry knowledge (but not stats) between playthroughs, enabling them to “remember” future tragedies and attempt to avert them.
• Life Simulation Grind: A monthly schedule system where you choose between studying, working in various colony sectors, or exploring the dangerous wilderness beyond the walls.
• Watercolor Aesthetic: A striking, hand-illustrated visual style that masks a surprisingly mature and often brutal narrative.

The core loop of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is simple on the surface: you choose an activity, gain some stats, and perhaps trigger a narrative event. But the friction lies in the opportunity cost. Choosing to study biology might help you solve a future famine, but it means neglecting the defense force while your friends are dying on the ramparts. This isn’t “flavor text” decision-making; the game handles onboarding friction well, slowly escalating the complexity of its card game while simultaneously ratcheting up the emotional stakes.

The Deck as Biography

In most deck-builders, you cull your deck to optimize for “meta” efficiency. In Exocolonist, culling a card is an act of forgetting. Forgetting the time your parents fought, or the time you saw something you shouldn’t have in the woods. The cards are color-coded by “suit” (Social, Mental, Physical), and the strategy involves building straights and flushes to meet ever-increasing score thresholds. It’s a clever system because it forces you to reconcile your strategic needs with your narrative identity. Do you keep that high-value “Trauma” card because its score is high, even though it represents a mental scar that hinders your character? This creates a unique tension where your strategic optimization is constantly at odds with your desire for the protagonist’s well-being.

The Loop and the Grind

The game’s time-loop mechanic is its most potent narrative weapon. A first playthrough is almost guaranteed to be a tragedy. The protagonist will be incompetent, late to the scene of a crime, and people they love will die. This is intentional. The loop provides a sense of agency that feels almost god-like in subsequent runs, yet it avoids the “power fantasy” trap by ensuring the world remains indifferent to your interventions. Even with “future knowledge,” the colony is a complex system of political and ecological variables. You can save a life, but you might do so at the cost of your soul or your standing in the community. The writing avoids the lazy habit of binary moral choices, opting instead for a messy, realistic gray area where there are no perfect “good” endings.

Narrative Permutations

The sheer density of the writing is where Exocolonist earns its acclaim. Most branching narratives feel like a tree where the trunk is identical and only the leaves differ. Here, the roots are different. A choice made at age eleven can radically alter a political coup at age nineteen. The game tracks an incredible number of variables, ensuring that each specific version of the protagonist feels like a bespoke creation. The onboarding into the game’s later-stage complexity is smooth, but the emotional payoff is sharp. It’s a rare game that manages to make “high-school drama” feel as high-stakes as “planetary genocide,” and it does so by treating both with equal gravity.

The aesthetic direction is remarkable. The watercolor art style provides a soft, ethereal quality to Vertumna that makes the sudden shifts into body horror and colonial violence even more jarring. It’s a deliberate stylistic choice that works beautifully with the game’s themes of nostalgia and memory. The UI design is functional, though it is built for larger displays and gets crowded on smaller screens. That matters for a game built on repetitive monthly cycles, where menu friction compounds quickly. The character portraits age dynamically over the decade, a small but vital detail that cements the passage of time.

On Steam, the game suits handheld play well: the “pick up and play” nature of the monthly turns is a natural fit for short sessions, though mouse-and-keyboard remains the superior setup for managing the more complex late-game card interactions. The Nintendo Switch version is built for portability, though the text can feel cramped in handheld mode. For a narrative journey of this length, the Switch is the way to go; for those wanting to pore over the fine details of the art, a high-resolution PC monitor is preferred.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a rare achievement in narrative architecture. It takes the “life sim” genre, often criticized for being aimless or overly cute, and injects it with a level of mechanical sophistication and emotional maturity that is startling. By turning a character’s life into a deck of cards, Northway Games has created a system where you don’t just “play” a story—you internalize it. We rate it a Great: clearly recommended for anyone interested in the future of interactive storytelling, with the caveats above worth weighing before committing to its decade-long loop.