I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

I put off this game for months because the art looked soft and the premise sounded like a young-adult visual novel with card window dressing. I was wrong, and wrong in ways that matter to people who care about decision systems. What Northway Games built is a life-sim RPG structured around a roguelite loop where your character, Sol, lives ten years on the alien planet Vertumna, dies or ages out, and then wakes up in a new life carrying memories of everything that went wrong the first time. The card mechanics are how those memories become mechanical objects: every experience you collect gets converted into a playable card, loosely following poker-style hand scoring with pairs, straights, flushes, and positional synergies that determine whether you pass a skill check or watch a colonist you like take a very permanent exit. The cards come in four types, emotional, physical, mental, and wild, and the stat system underneath them covers fifteen skills across social, mental, and physical groups, including bravery, toughness, empathy, and organization. Each skill unlocks new job options and dialogue branches, so your build choices in year one are still paying off, or biting you, in year nine. The roguelite structure is what makes this interesting from a systems perspective. Your character remembers previous lives, which means a second or third playthrough is not repetition, it is informed optimization. You know that the Glow season brings colony-threatening events, so you can bank stress recovery and choose activities that raise the right combat skills before the dangerous months arrive. There are seven saveable characters, and the conditions for saving each of them are spread across choices that feel genuinely consequential rather than flagged with obvious moral prompts. The game tracks over a thousand triggerable events built on thousands of conditional statements, which means the design work underneath the gentle artwork is quietly enormous. The criticism that the card mini-game grows less demanding in the late game is fair: once your deck is well-built the poker-hand scoring becomes more routine than challenging, and the four color types do not differentiate mechanically as much as they probably should. If you arrive expecting Slay the Spire-level card complexity, recalibrate immediately. What the game does exceptionally well is integrate its mechanical layer with its narrative one. Every card is a memory. Reviewing your deck before a challenge means scanning the actual shape of your character's childhood, which lands differently than a stat screen ever could. There are twenty-nine endings tied to career paths, relationship outcomes, and colony-level political decisions, including overthrowing military governor Lum via coup, brokering a negotiated peace with the alien Gardeners, or simply running away with a romantic partner at age eighteen. The writing earns the emotional weight it asks for without much telegraphing, especially in the early-game deaths, which arrive the way losses arrive for a ten-year-old: without warning and without ceremony. The game ships with a detailed, opt-in content warning system accessible from settings, which is handled better here than in almost any other title in the genre. Players who want to avoid specific trigger topics can read granular breakdowns before proceeding. That is useful design, not decoration. For strategy and sim players who mostly ignore visual novels: this is the crossover worth making. The optimization loop across multiple playthroughs, the skill-gating, the seasonal planning around Glow, the kudos economy at the Supply Depot, the build trade-offs between maxing a single skill versus staying well-rounded enough to handle whatever catastrophe the colony throws at you next, all of that is genuine systems thinking dressed in hand-drawn pastel art. The first run will hurt. That is intentional. The second run is where the game actually begins.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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