Anyway, to add to Hindsight andArcade Paradise, here’s another.
In other words, it’s a game about memory.
In Exocolonist, you take your child from the age of ten up until they’re twenty.
So a social task gives you better social skills, and a science task gives you better science skills.
But you also earn skills by forging relationships and exploring the environment.
I’m getting drawn into the systems again, which is easy to do here.
It’s fun to muddle through this and get to grips with it.
But what I really love is the cards themselves.
Because the cards are formative memories, and you get awarded them by making memories in the game.
This is brilliant, I think.
And yet it’s odd at times, almost painful.
Recently I had the option to forget learning to giggle.
It was a card that gave me nothing at all, but should I really be without that?
To make this work in a game, Exocolonist has to make an unconscious process conscious.
I was sure of it, even though I logically and intellectually knew it hadn’t.
And the reason I was sure of it was that it just really felt like it had.
There’s the world, then there’s my perceptions of the world.
But what about the wonky vision?
But ultimately, Exocolonist makes me realise that even that part of the story is interesting.
Forgetting memories, creating new ones, shaping them and reshaping them.
This is how we grow up, and maybe that process never really ends.
