I'm not normally prone to hyperbole, but I Was a Teenage Exocolonist genuinely is a modern classic. The quality of the writing, the complexity of the characters, the emotional investment, and the amazing replayability make this game stand out.

Currently Exocolonist has nowhere near the profile or credit it deserves, and I would encourage anyone on the fence about whether this is likely to be their thing to give it a go. Please.

Exocolonist is very much its own game, however it straddles a space somewhere between visual novel (VN), RPG and princess builders (such as Long Live the Queen and Volcano Princess).

The risk of dropping a term like “visual novel” about a game such as this is that it risks creating the impression of click and read. I hate click and read, and most VNs leave me cold. I therefore use the term advisedly because it’s not like that at all. What the game is, instead, is heavily story driven with more reading than most people are likely used to.

In Exocolonist you play as the main protagonist arriving on a new colony world. Your primary interactions are with other colony ship children who age together with you across seasons and years until you are 20 years old, at which point the game ends.

Gameplay involves walking around different, smallish, maps interacting with other characters, building up skills and relationships, and revealing factoids about the other children, the new world you have colonised, and ultimately the adult world going on around you and their politics.

Most events and interactions trigger stat increases across 12 broad categories. What areas you focus on can dramatically alter the events that you trigger and the skill checks you are able to pass across your journey.

All main characters are potentially romanceable, although mostly in a pragmatic way – which is to say, most romance chains stay effectively platonic and the characters you romance maintain their own autonomy and quirks. The relationship outro also inevitably peters off into melancholy – for example distant characters stay distant, they drift away emotionally or get absorbed in their work, etc. Kind of like real life.

Or you can completely skip all romance chains and focus on saving your colony from collapse, or investigating this strange new planet you have found yourself living on, or on a career, or (eventually) playing politics with the adults.

It’s all very adult, and realistic, and emotionally impactful, but may feel a touch unsatisfying if your main goal in computer gaming is pure escapism.

Other than walking around maps, training up stats, triggering events, and interacting with other characters the other main element of gamification here is the card system.

As you experience the world you are rewarded with cards as a proxy for life’s experiences – such as [played] “Hide and Seek with Nougat”, “Harvesting Mushwood” and [learned] “Dys's Secret”. The cards have one of three different colors, corresponding to broad stat building themes, and a number. Later events as you age inevitably reward cards with higher values. To pass a skill check you need to arrange your cards into straights and runs.

The card system was more than complex enough for me as it gives a wonderful sense of agency, without being overly onerous or punishing. The tests are inevitably a reasonably straightforward exercise in pair matching and light mental arithmetic.

Finally, I absolutely despise replaying most games - one run though of a game is inevitably enough. Except in this case, where I have completed three full runs and started a fourth. (A full run takes around 7 hours.)

Exocolonist has a wonderful ability to encourage replayability. In part, this is because it is so content-dense that it is literally impossible to experience more than a fraction of what the game has to offer on a single playthough. The game also, very smartly, acknowledges the conceit with references to past (and future) lives and an end of game admonishment to “do better next time”.

There is, indeed, a lot of incentive to do better next time, in part because bad things happen in the game to nice people, and across multiple replays you can find ways to save them and to improve the colony's chances of success.

Taking certain routes through the story can also unlock additional story lines and options in future playthroughs.

If you haven’t worked this out already, I cannot recommend this game highly enough.

edit: massive new free update, lots more to do. I adore this game. :D

Casual game, well written with a great sense of humour.

Similar to Oh...Sir!! The Insult Simulator in tone and writing style. The smut is risqué, double entendre, private British school boy, slapstick.

For the most part there's not much to see that you wouldn't happily show your grandmother other than cartoonish splash pictures at infrequent milestones (eg recruiting new characters, levelling up relationships).

There is also a free uncensor DLC in the store that removes the black bars over body parts, making the character creation screen very... pink, which may be relevant to who you have watching over your shoulder at the start when designing your main character.

The women give as good lip as the men and are fully empowered in all the interactions that I have observed. Everyone of all genders is romanceable and the main character can be any combination of physical attributes and clothing styles from any gender.

A lot of effort has been made to make the romance options as appealing with the men as they are with the women, and there is an equal number of male and female characters to interact with. Although never explicitly so, the tone and style of your interactions with the men tends more towards gay male, however, so if you're a straight woman your mileage may vary depending on your attitude to such things.

At no point did I ever see anything even close to needing a trigger warning. In fact, everything was just sweet, funny, inclusive and empowering.

You as the main character are played entirely for laughs, leaving the power dynamic firmly on the side of all the other characters that you engage with. Even your 'rival' is pretty nice.

There really isn't any significant strategy to speak of. The business side of things is structured as a battle game - train your managers up, battle rival 'companies' and take them over. It could have been a zombie game for all the relevance the mechanics have, but it works.

I found myself up at 3am still playing on my first day, which I haven't done with another game for quite some time.

Whether you think the price is appropriate for a really chilled, funny, well made, addictive casual game is up to you, but I personally got more than my money's worth. The world needs more games like this.