If Legacy was the good, and Exiled Prince was the bad, this is right in the middle.

In an attempt to do more cross-media outings, the people at Bioware got together with Felicia Day to create the Dragon Age Redemption live series, as well as this add-on, both of which released on the same day and all centering on an Elf character she conceived known as Tallis. I never watched Redemption and don't care to, and my experience with things Felicia Day was in is small, so how does this celebrity-driven new character fair under my circumstances? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh she's alright. While I think her quip-style nature (in fact this also goes for certain other comedic elements in this campaign's story) can be rather bad, and there's a weird fixation on getting to be Nice™ to her with some unnecessarily amount of romance options, I can't quite say she's super egregious and intrusive regardless. The crux of her dilemma centering on the Qun's Ben-Hassrath philosophy helps flesh both her and the faction out just a bit, she's an adequate enough Rogue to pull some muscle in combat, and I'll admit there were a handful of times she got me to chuckle. I was weary about this, but I think anyone trying to posit this as a Writer's Pet scenario are rather exaggerating the ordeal.

As for the actual content within, it's.... well it's just standard Bioware fair. Walk around a slice of Orlais thanks to the backdrop of Chateau Haine for a bit, participate in numerous events organized by Duke Prosper de Montford alongside offbeaten sidequesting, do more walking around and infiltrating to hit your main goal, go all in on the dungeon combat once caught, I can't exactly say much since all I experienced here isn't all that different than their prior outings. Well, there is an optional stealth section you can partake in, and it sure is a stealth section added onto a game that isn't known for stealth! Don't take all of this as a bad thing though, since this is once again released well after the base game's launch all the tweaks and considerations applied onto Legacy were still done here as well, so again, no stupidly elongated combat sequences and everything goes down as quickly as they should be. This was marked as a 2-4 hour endeavor on HowLongToBeat, and it's sure as hell felt like I spent 2-4 hours doing all of it. The optional Sky Horror encounter and the final bout against the Duke didn't feel all that gruesome, but they're still very much things that can trip you up if you aren't keeping on your toes and doing some level of thinking, which again, felt nice considering what the base game was like.

Usually when Bioware does their final add-on for a game, there's a sense of finality to it, but this is the rare time where the ending is just... that. It closes off suddenly, and not much else reinforces the type of mini-theme that this was about, or even the main theme. Mike Laidlaw did talk about how the work being done on Frostbite, and ostensibly the work for Inquisition, caused them to pull the plug on a big expansion they were tinkering away on, and rework some of its transitory essence into full-on plot points for that title, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was to be the final farewell to this entry. Whatever the case, I suppose it's fitting that this - and hell, this trio of add-ons as a whole - have perfectly encapsulated the rocky, rocky foundation of Dragon Age 2 succinctly and effectively.

Pros:
- Well written dialogue with good characters who develop as they age alongside your character
- Great sci-fi worldbuilding, much of my enjoyment was just learning more about the alien planet and its ecosystems as you build up the colony
- Large variety of choices to really personalize your character and their traits from age 10 to 20, as well as letting you adjust your appearance and gender/pronouns whenever you like which was much appreciated
- The game’s deck card system is simple but makes for an interesting alternative to standard skill checks, and can adjust its difficulty to your liking
- Calming OST that doesn’t get in the way but greatly adds to the game’s atmosphere
- Incentive to replay due to the mechanic of remembering events from your past playthrough, which can open up even more choices (though I only did two full runs)

Cons:
- As the game nears age 20, it can start to feel a bit aimless as you exhaust most unique events and kinda go through the motions til it ends a bit anticlimactically. But this probably depends on your story choices since there’s quite a few different endings

start writing a review
I was a teenage exocolonist (which I will call “exocolonist” from now on because that name is too long) is a beautifully queer game.
Just how queer it is becomes obvious immediately during character creation. The game not only lets you choose your pronouns, it lets you customize them. You can have neopronouns. You can have he/him pronouns but use feminine terms like girl and mother. You can have she/they pronouns and use a mix of feminine, masculine, and neutral terms. Literally every single instance of this game using gendered language to refer to the mc is customizable. And your appearance and physical sex are customizable separately from all of this.
The relationships you can have with the other characters (and that they can have with each other) are also beautifully multifaceted. No romance option is gender locked. Some characters will start (queer) relationships on their own, no one is throwing themselves at your feet. There are multiple trans and nonbinary characters. One character is aroace. Not every romance starts at a high friendship level. Not every “romance” is a romance, some characters are happy to be your friends with benefits. Multiple characters are polyamorous. And some relationships in this game are queerplatonic, which is what queer people call relationships we can’t describe properly but they’re really beautiful.
Exocolonist has the best portrayal of gender, love, and sexuality out of any game I’ve ever played, except for maybe Heaven Will Be Mine.
is that what I want my review to be about? Isn’t this game so much more than just a dating sim?


start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful game about growing up.
Your experiences shape you. The memories you make become the cards you end up using to win the challenges later in your life. I wish the game wasn’t as committed to being a game in some parts because removing some treasured memory because I need to optimize my deck kinda sucks.
This alone already tells a beautiful growing up story, but what makes the game really special is how your relationships to the world, and especially the other children around you change. You start out doing either simple tasks or learning in school and end the game doing things that require highly specialized skills. Most of the adults go from treating you like, well, a child to treating you like an equal.
Your childhood friends will all develop in vastly different directions. Friends thought to be inseparable become bitter rivals. Some go down dark paths and you desperately try to stop them, not always succeeding. But some also grow to lead happy lives and you’re happy for them.
Exocolonist portrays the journey from child to young adult, both the good and the bad.
did I just write this entire review without mentioning that this is a cool science fiction story?


start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful political science fiction story.
You live in a Utopia that is unlike anything possible with our current technology. There are some interesting political thoughts in this game like how to encourage art in a (mostly) moneyless society, but it unfortunately doesn’t ever dive too deeply into any of them.
The game is also kinda weird about violence. It presents the positions of “violence is good when justified”, “violence is always bad”, and “violence is always bad but sometimes it is still necessary and justified” but there are multiple instances where you are forced to choose between the first two.
As a sci-fi story it has everything you could want. You’re one of the first children born in space, you and everyone else has cool genetic enhancements, you are part of a small group who are trying to be the first humans to life on an alien planet, there are cool aliens and the story explores the theme of living in harmony with nature or bending nature to your will and there’s a cool AI you can befriend and a wormhole and…
A wormhole
Yes, a wormhole. What was so special about this wormhole? Come on, tell the people

Yes, I know how to review this game now, but I’ll have to spoil a game mechanic that you might discover as early as reloading an old safe or as late as starting your second run. I had it spoiled for me before I started playing the game and didn’t mind at all but if you want an unspoiled experience I recommend you stop reading and start playing now


start writing a review again
Whenever a game has multiple routes/endings, people will replay it over and over. Some games use this to pad their playtime, some use it to tell the same story from different perspectives, and exocolonist deconstructs it to a degree.
In exocolonist, the mc retains some knowledge from previous playthroughs when you start a new game. This allows you to save people you couldn’t save the first time, take shortcuts to things that took a long time to solve previously and just generally makes your life easier.
This recontextualizes replays from being something you the player are doing to see all the content in this game to something the mc is doing to improve their life. No ending is perfect (though some are much closer to perfect than others) so there is always a reason to come back and try something differently.
Unfortunately for this game I played it after I played Everhood, so now a story about constantly relieving your life to chase after some unobtainable perfection feels slightly wrong to me. There is a way to break this loop, but the game portrays this as a bad ending and offers you to restore the loop with basically no consequences.
I’ll just pretend that after I got the ending that is as close to perfection to me as possible, the mc decided to stop this loop. I won’t replay the game again anytime soon. Solana’s happy.

That’s a pretty decent review but I still feel like it doesn’t do the game justice


start writing a review again
No review can do this game justice. It is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a queer dating sim, it’s about growing up, it’s a political sci-fi story and it’s a cool meta game, but it’s so much more than this.
This game is really special. Go and check it out.