In a current put up on the PlayStation Weblog, the builders behind I Was A Teenage Exocolonist offered their first sport as “Blue hair and pronouns,” a reference to a common meme throughout the LGBTQ group. I respect the heart it takes to do this. We reside in a world the place placing your pronouns in your social media can invite ridicule, and centering inclusivity means opening your self as much as public scrutiny the best way that Boyfriend Dungeon did. Exocolonist is open and honest about its anticapitalist politics, however it’s finally not a profitable critique of the capitalist society that the colonists selected to flee.
You play as a blue-haired spacer who’s among the many first people to efficiently colonize a far-off planet named Vertumna. Doing so was really unlawful, however your mother and father had been fed up with how oppressive Earth had turn out to be beneath late capitalism. You must survive the unusual wildlife, the fixed meals shortages, and, oh yeah, the hostile beings that attempt to sabotage the colony yearly. The sport takes place over a interval of a number of years, and your character (together with their mates) grows up over time. There’s additionally a little bit of a Groundhog Day twist—each time you full a run and begin a brand new save file, your character remembers parts of their previous life. Appearing on these recollections is vital to avoiding sure tragedies, however these large, life-and-death selections are few and much between. Most of Exocolonist consists of labor and social occasions, like within the Persona sequence.
Exocolonist is a choose-your-own-adventure sport with some exploration parts. Each month, you select what sort of exercise that you simply’ll be spending Stress factors in. You may go to courses, work on the farm, make deliveries, cook dinner meals, and discover the harmful world past the colony’s partitions. Typically, you’ll encounter procedurally generated plot eventualities primarily based on stats or earlier selections you’ve made within the sport. Lots of them are slice-of-life eventualities, like serving to your childhood good friend within the kitchen, or fixing up some rampaging AI. Relying on the way you reply, you may acquire factors in varied social, psychological, or bodily attributes.
Some main life occasions will even provide you with playing cards in your psychological deck, a group of key recollections out of your character’s life by which every card has a selected level worth or particular impact. Occasions from childhood are usually low-value, whereas high-value playing cards are generated out of your character’s teen years or maturity.
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These playing cards are utilized in a minigame by which it’s important to hit a sure quantity to succeed at a story problem. The sport itself is pretty unremarkable, however there are some attention-grabbing implications. Because you solely draw a restricted variety of playing cards per spherical (and most matches solely consist of 1 spherical), being a profitable card shark requires you to relaxation frequently or pay as much as “neglect” decrease worth playing cards out of your character’s childhood. I believed that it was a poignant system for exhibiting how nostalgia can maintain us again from being profitable at what we’re attempting to do within the current.
For all its mechanical simplicity, the place Exocolonist really shines is in its intensive and fearless worldbuilding. The writers’ love for Vertumna’s unusual flora and megafauna shines within the sport’s vivid descriptions, which helped make expeditions one among my favourite elements of the sport. The colony has queer-friendly insurance policies that make it doable for characters to have various households and lives, and the sport doesn’t really feel the necessity to justify or clarify these accomodations. Furthermore, Exocolonist may be very critical in regards to the teenage expertise. I feel this is perhaps the primary sport by which I’ve seen puberty being sincerely mentioned in shut element, quite than as a one-off joke. Exocolonist is courageous in ways in which even many different indie video games fail to be. Which is why I felt let down each time the sport tried to interact in critical political subjects.
All through the sport, the characters attempt to problem capitalism in ways in which don’t make a ton of sense. Your domineering, wealthy good friend Marz needs to be the long run governor of the colony, however worries about reproducing the failed capitalist system of Earth. She pats herself on the again upon deciding that she wanted folks such as you to maintain her trustworthy (How?). When the researcher Tangent discusses potential choices for bettering the colony’s inhabitants numbers, one among my doable responses was “Good motive, nonetheless eugenics.” After a militarized colony involves Vertumna and tries to imagine command, one of many space-born settlers calls one among its troopers a “fascist” at a celebration. I puzzled to myself, as I usually did once I noticed younger folks calling mildly problematic folks “fascists’’ on-line: Does he know what a fascist is? Afterward, the accusation isn’t introduced up once more. It actually felt like scrolling down my social media feed to learn left-leaning zingers that by no means flip into precise substance.
These interactions really feel extremely odd, because the sport tried to persuade me early on that these are youngsters who’ve by no means skilled trendy capitalism. They discovered about these oppressions by taking courses, not in contrast to how I discovered about feudalism in highschool. But so most of the hamfisted ethics debates really feel like they may have been pulled from queer Twitter. That did a large disservice to the charming forged and the imaginative world that Exocolonist constructed up. Worldbuilding is inherently political, however it additionally must be in keeping with itself. After I communicate to the daring and assured Marz, I need her phrases to really feel constant together with her personal historical past and experiences. As a substitute, I felt like she was projecting the insecurities of somebody from planet Earth. The younger folks within the colony ultimately determine that they need to break away from Earth’s foibles, however the sport by no means goes all the best way.
For instance, I used to be offered with gender sliders once I was requested to customise my character. Indie studios usually don’t have the sources to construct out full customization choices, however I really feel just like the “female” and “masculine” sliders had been a step backwards. On the female aspect, the character portrait had lengthy hair. On the masculine aspect, the hair was quick. In Chinese language tradition, lengthy hair continues to be usually seen as very masculine. For the reason that sport provided me the selection of customizing my protagonist’s gender, it felt aggravating that I used to be being held to a Eurocentric, binary concept of what gender bodily seems to be like.
The sport can also be inconsistent about the way it engages with oppressions that aren’t queerphobia. Fortunately, there are pacifist choices to oppose the hyper-nationalist army faction that wishes to dominate Vertumna. However you may play two entire runs with out the sport ever really grappling with the settlers’ colonialism, as a result of, they inform themselves, it’s an “deserted” planet, and they also’re not colonists in any respect. Effectively, it seems that Vertumna isn’t deserted. And the sentient beings that preserve attacking the colony are some form of monstrous, non-communicative beings who both act as militarily hostile conquerors, or instantly flee on sight. Their delinquent conduct supplies cowl for each the “good” colonists and the closely armed “dangerous” colonists to justify army motion over any makes an attempt at diplomacy. Although the sport is rebellious in some methods, Exocolonist pinkwashes the inherent violence of their utopia venture.
Regardless of the colony’s morally grey place, their struggles with provides and self-sufficiency felt genuinely transferring. I welcomed how secure Vertumna felt early on. The adults had been right here to deal with all the pieces, and I may contribute to the group in several methods, equivalent to scouting for meals sources or serving to within the greenhouse. Exocolonist felt chill and lo-fi, till it wasn’t. Random occasions would blow in and devastate the group. As I ignored the wreckage of my previous dormitory, I discovered myself lacking the foolish schoolyard days. I initially felt that Exocolonist had too many emotional guardrails. When tragedy struck, the emotional impression was extra devastating due to how secure the colony appeared earlier than.
However as a substitute of studying tips on how to reside with tragedy, the sport pushes you to forestall them within the subsequent lifetime. On the finish of each playthrough, an aged model of your character tells you you can keep away from sure horrible outcomes (equivalent to character deaths) by making the right selections. Simply tinker with the timeline slightly bit, and you’ll have a barely much less brutal life than the one earlier than. After I saved a good friend from a horrible loss of life, I noticed that I may by no means have saved her on the primary playthrough. She was at all times fated to die within the first timeline. New Recreation+ is about studying from previous errors and choosing the right leaders, the proper selections, the proper futures. Hardships are merely part of life, and I resented the best way that the epilogue character informed me that I may (that I ought to) reside one other cycle with a view to save my childhood good friend. That I had failed her by not understanding that she would die in an unpredictable accident. The cardboard sport communicated that clinging to the previous (holding onto playing cards from infancy or childhood) can stop somebody from transferring on within the current. Utilizing the time loop to repair my protagonist’s life felt like the other of that.
Exocolonist is an bold sport, and it manages to be charming regardless of its shortcomings. I simply want that it wasn’t so fast to clean over any sources of battle in methods that may really feel too abrupt. If there are any uncomfortable ethical ambiguities within the characters’ phrases or actions, they need to be instantly defined away or justified. Each time it occurred, I felt that it was a creatively timid resolution. Though the sport admirably tries to current a society the place folks could be themselves with out oppression, it’s finally afraid of confronting the fact that uncomfortable political conflicts and ambiguities would exist even in such a society. It is a world the place folks could be free to specific their interior reality, as long as it’s about gender. However as I discovered once I amassed Insurgent factors for voicing a milquetoast opinion within the sport’s social research class, god forbid that your opinions about society veer 5 % from the accepted norm on Vertumna. (The unbending dogma of the colonists felt uncomfortably like some leftist e-book golf equipment I’ve sat in.)
I wished extra sources of fantastic, conflicting mess from an area colonialism sport. I obtained Exocolonist as a substitute.
