Video Game / I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

Vertumna is now humanity's first exocolony.^note From left to right: Rex, Nomi-Nomi, Vace, Sym, Dys, Anemone, Tammy, Cal, the protagonist/"Sol", Marz, and Tang

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a Solar Punk Life Simulation Game developed by Northway Games and published by Finji. It was released on the 25th of August in 2022 on Steam, the PS4, the PS5, and the Nintendo Switch.

You start the game as a ten-year-old child, one of several born en route to Vertumna IV, a distant alien planet. As your spaceship home passes through a wormhole, an accident sends you into a coma- and awakens a strange ability to see potential futures. Your dreams are confusing, filled with skies and plants you've never seen. The worst are the nightmares, nightmares of terrible xenofauna attacking everyone you love.

You wake up on Vertumna, surrounded by humanity's first colony. What will you do with your life on this alien world? Will you fight the monsters of your visions, or find a way to live in peace with them? Will you accept your powers? And what of your fellow colonists, the future of Vertumna?

The choice is up to you.

The game has the Player Character spending 10 years on Vertumna exploring the planet, working in various jobs to build their stats and earn Kudos, and maintaining their friendships/relationships with their fellow colonists. Its narrative plays out like a Visual Novel, with certain choices that require a high enough stat or winning in the Deckbuilding minigame, where the MC has to arrange their memories, which are represented by cards, by color and/or number to reach the target score.

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This game includes the following tropes:

• Act of True Love: Among Sol's peers, Dys in particular has wishes that are at odds with staying in the colony in the long term. Depending of how his plans pan out, Sol may end up actively helping Dys do something that will make him happy, but also guarantees that they will never see him again in human form afterwards. That help carries extra weight if Sol is close friends with him or his romantic partner, as they are choosing his happiness over keeping him in their life.
• After the End: The game takes place in the far future, 20 years after the Stratospheric left Earth for Vertumna because the former became uninhabitable due to many factors such as climate change, pollution, and nuclear war.
• Alcoholic Parent: Besk, Dys and Tang's mother, is remembered as a depressed drunk by the latter. An event during which Marz is looking at photos from her childhood includes one of Dys and Tang at their shared fifth birthday party with their mother just out of frame, holding a drink.
• All Animals Are Dogs: Vriki, which are spider-octopus aliens, can be tamed and trained just like Earth dogs. Cal suggests training it with a clicker if it's your pet.
• Alliterative Name: Every region of Vertumna: the Valley of Vertigo, the Subaqueous Swamp, etc.
• Alternative Calendar: A year on Vertumna is a little longer than a year on Earth. It's divided into 13 months across five seasons: 3 months each of Quiet, Pollen, Dust, and Wet, and 1 month of Glow.
• Ambition Is Evil: Averted. Lum's threat to the planet can only be ended by an MC who's specialized in politics, or by Marzipan - who's a junior politician herself.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • You can toggle Seen Dialog so that dialog choices that you already made in a previous run can be marked and skipped. It also speeds up parts of it so you can skip straight to the choices.
  • Thanks to your Past-Life Memories, you can instantly skip certain subplots once you've learned how to complete them in previous runs, such as finding the cure for Shimmer to save your dad.
• Anyone Can Die: The Strato colony faces dangers on Vertumna within the first few months of landing on it, and kids and adults alike, including your parents and close friends, as stated in the Content Warnings, aren't safe from its perils. However, your ability to recall your past lives allows you to save them in future playthroughs.
• Asteroids Monster: Sugarbugs are small, marshmallow-like aliens that reproduce when cut into several pieces.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Stressful Event memory is a powerful card, which is worth 8 points, but it gives you 10 Stress.
• Babies Ever After: You and your Love Interest can start a family in one of the game's many endings, and so does your pet if you have one. Cal and Tammy also have many more children after Echinacea if they formalize their union and settle down.
• Badass Bookworm: Mental perks are as useful as physical ones, and can give you highly effective cards and perks that can be used in any card game - including combat encounters. In particular, Engineering skill can turn your brain into a lethal weapon both mechanically and in-story.
• Bee Afraid: The squeedgers are bee-like aliens that attack you if provoked, but since they have a rudimentary danger system, they're easy to sneak past to harvest their honey from the queen. When female squeedgers mature into queens, they metamorphose into immobile hives to nourish their larvae with the honey they secrete from their deep, tunnel-like pores, and they also protect them with an acid mist.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: After fighting with Cal during your 18th birthday party, the Helios youth make some parting shots about his "alleged romantic interactions with the floatcows" before leaving.
• Binary Suns: Vertumna has two suns: the customary hot, yellow sun, and a (relatively) cooler blue sun.
• Binomium ridiculus:
  • You can help Tang with cataloguing the Vertumnan flora by making up scientific names for them such as Wonkius shrubbius and Purpleus grassium.
  • One possible conversation with Tang has her offer to name a species she has recently discovered after Sol. If the player has Sol suggest that Tang name the species after herself, Tang says she can't do that... because she already did it for six other species.
  • If Sol becomes a botanist, which results in them discovering thousands of new species over their lifetime, they will name them all after their friends if loyal and deliberately give them silly names if rebellious.
• Bio-Augmentation: Each child receives one augmentation, ranging from incredible eyesight to perpetually flexible brain neurons to just being really, really calm. They see their first signs of it at six.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: The whole appeal of Glow season. Vertumna's suns never rise above the colony's horizon, and the planet draws close to the wormhole the entire system orbits. The UV rays shining off the wormhole's event horizon make the fungal flora of Vertumna fluoresce in a splendid array of ghostly colors, providing the majority of natural light for an entire month.
• Bittersweet Ending: Most of the standard endings are this, filled with mundane tragedy and uncertainty about humanity's future on Vertumna. Even some of the "bad" endings are not entirely bleak - "Green Vertumna Forever" does feature a complete ecological collapse, but the humans do have a genuine chance to ever-so-slowly terraform the planet into a new Earth.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Much of the life on Vertumna is hard to classify between plant, animal or mineral. It includes things like animals that photosynthesize, lifeforms that appear to be plants until they start to walk around and small metallic orbs that feature antennae and feed on electricity.
• Bizarre Seasons: Seasons on Vertumna include Pollen - when the air is full of it and everything is tinged slightly pink - and Glow, when the sky is completely dark and the only natural illumination is giant glowing mushrooms. Some colonists find the latter so creepy that they stay inside until the season's over.
• Bookends: The game typically begins and ends with the protagonist getting trapped in the shed fire and a grown-up Anemone rescuing them from the doglike alien. In the end, they realize that the vision they had at the beginning came true, but this time, they've developed the skills to fight it.
• Both Sides Have a Point:
  • The game takes this view of the Strato-Helios divide. Strato needs Helios for their food rations (in the first playthrough, at least), more effective weapons, and trained soldiers. Helios needs Strato for their past experience living on Vertumna, their more ethical and less toxic cultural mindset, their larger archive of cultural works, their more powerful AI, the greater acceptance and fulfillment they give the children of Helios unsuited for combat, and Sol's ability to make peace with the Gardeners. This is why all transitions of power between the two are Velvet Revolutions at worst.
  • The conflict between pacifists and fighters in the colony. Cal doesn't believe in violence, and a peaceful solution is possible, but in the meantime, the colony is under attack by an alien threat and humans aren't wrong to defend their new home.
• Broken Bridge: All the random events outside the colony block your way, and you must interact with them in order to proceed, but mastering your Perception skill lets you bypass them.
• But Thou Must!:
  • If Marz organizes a Toilet Paper Prank in the classroom, you can try to stop your friends from joining her instead of joining in yourself, but while you receive points for Loyalty, Marz will threaten you into joining them, anyway.
  • In Marz's four-heart event, she notices how "hideous" you look and offers to give you a makeover. You can tell her that you're "not [her] doll", but she'll insist that she's doing you a favor, anyway, so you don't have much choice but to go along with her.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The game takes place in the far future where humans left Earth to colonize an alien planet, Vertumna. To distance themselves from their Earth origins, the Strato and Helio colonies give different names for Earth technology such as "hearspeaks" for earphones, "virtspace helmets" for VR helmets, and "vintage focus devices" for fidget spinners.
• The Caper: In the backstory. The Vertumna Group purchased, borrowed, salvaged, or outright stole a huge trove of highly advanced technology, including gene editors and a strong AI, as well as a starship, and fled the Sol system without official permission. Eudicot, Flulu and Instance were all directly, personally involved and are wanted by Earth's government.
• Capitalism Is Bad: One of the classes the players attend will talk about Earth's history with an emphasis on the destructiveness of capitalism. Your colony seems to actively discourage practices that they feel would reintroduce Earth's troubles, such as discouraging the hoarding of merits to avoid inequality among the community. However, at one point, the PC can argue in favor of capitalism without being called out by the narrative, and even say that capitalism looks bad because the Stratospheric colonists wrote the lessons.
• Cassandra Truth: The MC tries to tell people about their visions, but (because not all of them come true) is dismissed as a liar. Eventually, the MC mostly stops talking about them, for reasons decided by the player. If the player insists on continuing to talk about them, they start being considered delusional, and they get Delusion cards, which have negative values.
• Cast from Money: The card obtained from getting into the early stages of friendship with Marz, who can be befriended via doing commerce-related jobs, costs a single Kudos to use. It can be upgraded twice so that you earn Kudos when you play it instead.
• Chameleon Camouflage: One Vertumnan species is an almost invisible, many-armed animal that wraps itself around trees.
• Changeling Tale: A setting-appropriate version of the trope gets discussed a couple of times:
  • Dys runs into the notion of human babies getting replaced by beings of another species and comes to wonder if it could have happened to himself and his twin sister, Tang. Both of them are knowledge-craving introverts who have trouble connecting with their peers and also see a lot of appeal in the idea of discarding their human body to come an AI.
  • During their childhood, Nomi-Nomi thought that themself and Rex, who are the My Species Doth Protest Too Much members of the Heliopause, were changelings. Their active imagination went as far as getting Teleportation technology involved in their theory.
• Childhood Friend Romance:
  • You can romance one of your childhood friends as you grow up together.
  • Cal and Tammy have known each other since they were toddlers, and if you save Tammy, they start dating around their respective 17th birthdays. In fact, when Cal was four, he promised to Tammy that they'd get married when they're older.
• Childhood Marriage Promise: When Cal was four, he promised Tammy that they'd get married when they were old enough.
• Color Motif:
  • Blue cards relate to academic knowledge, and they can be earned by things like answering a question correctly in school or befriending Tangent.
  • Yellow cards relate to social knowledge, like deducing what someone is worried about or saving Tammy.
  • Red cards relate to physical prowess, like winning a game of sportsball or chasing a Mysterious Watcher.
  • Wild cards are a pinkish-purple rainbow; they're tied to a number of things, including wild leaps of logic and enthusiasm or your visions.
• Company Cross References: Some cards have references to other games published by Finji:
  • The Coloring the World card features Chicory's Brush.
  • The Organizing the Storage Room card features Wilmot.
• Content Warning: The game features an extensive list of the mature or potentially distressing content it contains accessible from the main or in-game menus. The entry on "Character Death" even includes a full-spoilers enumeration of who dies and whether or not it can be prevented.
• Continuity Nod: During an event working as a delivery person, it's possible for Sol to discover that Chief Administrator Seeq sculpts as a hobby, via an example of Seeq's output that promptly becomes the quirkiest thing about them. During an event from the Governor's assistant job, Seeq asks Sol if they can trust them for a prospective task. One of Sol's possible responses is to ask Seeq if the task is "about [Seeq's] weird sculptures," (it turns out to not be the case) due to Seeq having last displayed similar behavior during the incident upon which Sol discovered their hobby.
• Cool Starship: The Stratospheric, a colony ship that survived twenty years of space travel. After landing, the colonists chose to name their settlement after it, and its remnants were repurposed into their first buildings. One character wishes she'd never left the Stratospheric, seeing it as more comfortable than the wild climate of Vertumna.
• Cosmic Motifs: All the MC's canonical names are some variation on the word "Sol", and the first necklace their father gives them is marked with a sun.
• Cruel to Be Kind: Because of the way floatcow biology works, there are two ways to help a upended one; you can milk it, if you have 20 skill in Animals, or you can cut its urine sac open with a knife, letting the overload of fluid gush out. This hurts the floatcow, but an easier skill test confirms that it's the only way you have to get it moving again.
• Cult: The Vertumna Group is called one by their enemies on Earth, but it lacks the abuse, religious culture, and rigid hierarchy often associated with the trope. Mostly they're just a self-sufficient commune that didn't like Earth's norms.
• Cult Colony: While not religious per se, the Strato Colony were originally a commune whose values are extremely different from Earth's, and they fled to Vertumna to escape persecution and be allowed to practice their way of life.

• Cynicism Catalyst: The death of Anemone's beloved brother Kom causes her to go from a plucky and cheerful girl to a bitter and angry young woman who joins the military dead-set on revenge. She also comes to scorn her once-beloved sportsball as a children's activity, devoting all her time to becoming a soldier.
• Dangerously Garish Environment: There are damn good reasons children are banned from going beyond the colony's walls, most notably the manticore.
• Dartboard of Hate: After an especially bad interaction with Marz, Dys can be found playing a holopalm game he made himself that consists of throwing virtual weapons at a picture of Marz. Having Sol try the game themself reveals that the game has a feature allowing the player to use a photo of their choice.
• Dating Sim: A small part of the gameplay. It's possible to date many characters, but some have love interests other than the MC that they will prioritize (unless given good reason not to). Others have hardlocked requirements for what they want out of a relationship (polygamy, children, etc...), or personal issues that prevent a long-term relationship regardless of what the player does.
• A Dog Named "Dog": One of the possible names the game suggests for the vriki you can tame is their species name.
• Don't Explain the Joke: If Tammy asks you what your favorite dessert is, you can reply, "Desert? I prefer the Sahara myself." However, she won't get the joke, and you have to explain it to her, which makes it less funny and causes her to lose confidence.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Figuring out how to keep the colony safe and secure, much less prosperous, is a process of solving one or two problems at a time until the MC accrues enough experiences across all their lifetimes to essentially single-handedly resolve every major issue in one triumphant lifetime.
• Easy Level Trick: Giving Sol's peers a gift on the right month is necessary to formally discover most birth months, but the Friends interface will display their ages from the beginning of the game. If the player keeps close enough attention to someone's age, it eventually goes up, on a different month of the year depending on the person, which is their proper birth month.
• Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas: When you help your dad with the animals for the third time, he runs a test to try translating what the trippets are saying. He says that they're either saying "kill all humans" or "linguini sportsball".
• Eldritch Abomination: While the xenofauna of Vertumna are already alien in nature, the Faceless that attacks the colony at the end of Year 5 is a giant, incomprehensible being with cloven hooves that unzips its faceless body to reveal numerous tentacles, some with eyes on them, and hundreds of teeth running across its "jawline".
• Eldritch Location: Even by the standards of alien planets, Vertumna is weird. Rocks that empathically project feelings onto you and heat-hazes through which you can see alternate versions of yourself are par for the course, to say nothing of the magic-granting wormhole hanging above it. Some of its weirdness is explained by alien technology, but most of it is just Vertumna's natural state.
• Equivalent Exchange: To reach Vertumna, a ship must lose whatever it needs the most. The Strato lost the microbial soil and hydroponics its people needed to grow food, the Helio lost the leadership necessary to keep them from devolving into a tyrannical militia, and so on. Future versions of Sol are able to avoid paying Strato's price, but only because it was already paid in a previous timeline they learned from.
• Everybody Must Get Stoned: When clearing the pixie beans for human consumption, Congruence forgets to check for their effects on people undergoing puberty. Since the pixie beans get debuted as a food source right when Sol and their peers are in the early stages of puberty, they come out of their first time eating them in an unusually good mood. If Sol both eats the beans and discovers their drug-like effects themself during a shift in the xenobotany lab, it's a small miracle they get to the end of the experiment.
• Evolving Title Screen: Getting the final friendship/romance event with any character will add them to the title screen. The player character's avatar can be added by destroying the wormhole-induced time loop, then deciding to bring it back.
• Expressive Health Bar: The Stress meter acts like an HP meter, which goes up each time you work or get sick or injured, with a maximum of 100. Your character's expression changes along with it, and they get exhausted when they reach maximum stress, leaving them unable to do anything but relax.
• Extra Eyes: Several alien species you encounter on Vertumna have multiple eyes:
  • The Eyebeasts that attack the colony at the end of the first year have eyes all over their bodies, and no one could tell which end is which.
  • The Hopeyes are one-legged kangaroo rat-like aliens with two pairs of eyes, one of which is extra large and sits where their ears would be if they were Earth rodents.
• Fake Difficulty: The game doesn't allow Sol to give each of their peers a gift more than once a season unless they max out their Creativity skill to reduce the cooldown to every month instead. Since birth months are mainly discovered via giving the right person a gift on the right month, it's possible to lock oneself out of the discovery for an entire year simply by giving them a gift on the month right before their birthday. Everyone but the twins having different birth months from each other won't necessarily cross the player's mind on its own, making it hard to figure out that only giving gifts to the children with unknown birthdays on months that aren't already "taken" is a viable strategy.
• Fantastic Ableism: "Genetic purity" (i.e, not having a mutation) is so far out of fashion that people pity children born with it. Having this background gives the MC extra money because bigots feel the need to reward them for anything they do right.
  MC blurb: You're [age], and doing just fine without any genetic enhancements, thank you very much.
• Fantastic Flora: Mushtrees produce incredibly light wood that can be lifted by hand, grow much faster if stimulated by a mild electrical current, and absorb water like a sponge, becoming bloated and mushy during Wet season.
• Fictional Currency: The colony provides all necessities and many communal luxuries, but anything unique or personal must be bought with "Kudos". This later becomes an issue when Marz attempts to recreate capitalism using Kudos as an actual means of exchange instead of a reward mechanism.
• Fictional Sport: Sportsball, a game that appears to be similar to volleyball.
• First Period Panic: The protagonist gets their first period when they're 13 if the player selects the corresponding puberty option for them. They can discreetly ask their mom for help, and she assures them that it's alright because it's just a sign that they're growing up, and the narration states that they can get hormone blockers if it's bothering them too much.
• Flower Motifs: The MC's default name options are all variants on "Solanaceae," the name of the plant family that includes toxic or psychoactive plants like tobacco, datura, and deadly nightshade as well as potatoes, eggplants, and tomatoes. Geranium (also named after a flower) often uses the common names of plants in this family as a nickname for his child (e.g. "Little Tomato").
• Forced Perspective: The "dog" in the intro cutscene only looks like a dog because of the angle the MC is looking at it from, probably coupled with the concussion they're suffering. It is NOT a dog.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Sol notices that Geranium and Flulu are working extremely long hours and seem to be worried about something at various points of the first playthrough's first three years. On the fourth year, it turns out that the Stratospheric lost the supplies necessary to grow Earth plants during the wormhole transit. On the fifth, it turns out that the fourth year's Glow attack damaging the fields got the colony months away from running out of food unless extra work is put into finding local sources of food.
  • The fact that the Shimmer is a Pollen-only disease is a hint towards the fact that it's vulnerable to a factor present during Dust, the season that immediately follows.
  • If Sol is able to repair the broken communication device that Dys steals from Command, they are able to pick up bits of a communication that is clearly from Command. The question of who that communication would for with no other human settlements around comes up. One of the things revealed after the Heliopause lands regardless of playthrough is that Eudicot has been communicating with the ship all along.
  • The Dartboard of Hate holopalm game Dys makes at some point includes a bomb as one of the virtual weapons. If left to his own devices, he eventually plants a real bomb on the colony's walls before disappearing. The fact that the game's target is a picture of Marz, who grows to want to become part of the colony's leadership, makes the game even more prophetic.
  • While relaxing on the walls, Dys can be seen drawing a person who looks nothing like anyone in the colony and says that he's "not good at drawing him yet" if complimented on the drawing. Depending on whether Sol has encountered Sym under the guise of the "Mysterious Stranger" or not, it can foreshadow Sym's very existence or the fact that Dys has also encountered him at a point where Sol has every right to assume he was some sort of hallucination.
  • A conversation with Tang reveals the colony to be at a high risk of getting a high rate of hereditary heart disease in a few generations. She also notes her own heart rate accelerating past an acceptable threshold if she's given the more potent version of blep tea that Sol can make while working in the xenobotany lab. Take a guess as to Tang's cause of death if she ends up dying relatively young.
• Gaia's Vengeance: The colony-breaching attack during Glow is made by multiple xenofauna- not only predators, but species that naturalists could've sworn were docile. Earlier, the MC may notice a tree being cut down and the other trees around it trembling in response. The Gardener Array is a planet-wide, partially fungus-based network of A.I.s responsible for the restoration of Vertumna's biosphere after its original inhabitants fled the ecological collapse of their civilization. As a whole, the Array thinks very poorly of "invasive species" like humanity (and their creators) and they invoke natural disasters and animal attacks against the colony in an attempt to purge what they see as a dangerous infection.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • After the 9th Vertumnalia Festival, you and your friends start noticing that you haven't been seeing Dys and are worrying about him. However, you can still talk to him in the overworld and bond with him since he doesn't actually disappear until that year's Glow Season unless you can convince him not to when you spot him setting up the bomb near the colony walls. On a similar note, at least one random job event mentioning Dys visiting can still pop up after he leaves for sure, or even after he has become a Gardener.
  • The birthdays (technically birth months) of Sol's peers are formally discovered via giving them a gift on the right month, though they can also learn Marz's birthday in one conversation with her about Valentine's Day. This needs to be done separately for pair of characters known to be twins.
• Gift-Giving Gaffe: There are some gifts that your friends don't like, deducting points from their heart meters, but you can avoid giving them the wrong gifts the next time around because they're recorded in their profiles.
• Golden Ending: The "Peace on Vertumna" ending requires the player to overthrow Lum's fascist government (resulting in either them or Marzipan becoming the colony's governor), go on enough expeditions to meet and befriend Symbiosis, discover the history of the Convergent Domain, and establish a permanent, mutually beneficial peace between the humans and the Gardeners. Getting this ending will also have a positive influence on Sol and their friend's futures (for example, since Vertumna no longer needs a standing army, Anemone returns to her childhood dream of becoming a Sportsball coach) and will result in the player character's parents dying happily, with their lifelong dreams fulfilled.
• Good Behavior Points: Kudos, the setting's currency, work like the Weird Currency variant, as they are entirely meant to reward others rather than oneself. One can receive them for any act that's appreciated by someone else, while taking them away is a possible means of punishing a disobedient child or work that was too sloppily done. They can also be earned from doing a needed job or doing well in school for an entire month.
• Good Parents: Geranium, Flulu, Tonin, Tirah, and Antecedent are loving, supportive parents to both their biological offspring as well as the other colony kids. Tammy and Cal become this to Tammy's child Echinacea if Tammy survives.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: One time while babysitting, Tammy says that she needs to put all the keiki (Hawaiian for "child") to bed.
• Groundhog Peggy Sue: Tammy and Hal's lives can only be saved on a playthrough other than the first, because of the protagonist's ability.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Sym is one of the 10 romanceable characters in the game, but you need to go on enough expeditions to encounter him. He's barely hinted at in a few random events outside the colony, and it's possible to miss him in an entire playthrough, but befriending him is required for the Golden Ending.
  • The card and image for the avoidable Shimmer-induced death are surprisingly easy to miss for the nature of the event they are tied to. It's easy to assume that all one needs to do to get them is let the person die, which is a given in any playthough in which Sol doesn't know how to cure the condition. In reality, the last choice made before the character's death matters and only one choice out of the three offered will unlock the card and the image. The reason that choice is the right one is quite subtle: it gets Sol to Geranium's deathbed sooner.
• Harmony Vs Discipline: The sides are represented by two acrimonious siblings. Tangent (Discipline) is a scientist whose belief in human supremacy may leads her to exterminate the xenofauna of Vertumna. Dys (Harmony), her brother, is an explorer who resents humanity and everything artificial, including the surgery that Tangent needs to feel comfortable in her body. The narrative takes the view that Both Sides Have a Point, and defines its Golden Ending as "a way to save both [the] colony and the planet".
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Social skills are as important as physical or mental abilities. In particular, one of the most generally-useful mutations is...a calm temperament, which reduces the stress you suffer, allowing you to get more stuff done with fewer months of downtime.
• Hippie Name: The Strato colonists' penchant for distinctive names (Geranium, Melatonin, Antecedent, etc) is an early hint that they're nonconformists who left Earth in the hope of creating a more flexible society. Very rarely do the colonists use anyone's full name.
• Honorary Uncle: Since the grown-ups take care of each other's kids, they call their friends' parents "uncle" or "auntie".
• Horde of Alien Locusts: The Maskwings are alien locusts bigger than the protagonist's fist that can devour their weight in leafy plant matter, fabric, wood, hair, or even skin in just an hour. When frightened, they flip their wings forward to make themselves look like manticores, and millions of them swarm in hot places such as the Western Wresting Ridge during the Dust Season.
• Hostile Terraforming: Governor Lum can force Instance and Tangent to release an engineered plague on Vertumna that kills everything larger than a small insect. The planet's biosphere crashes hard and the colony shelters in a bunker for years, but at the end of it all, the soil is fertilized by all the death and the Gardeners are crippled if not outright destroyed, so the colony can begin using their Earth seed stores to reclaim the wasteland in the Earth's image.
• How Dad Met Mom: After the Heliopause arrives, the protagonist can sit with their dad to listen to the story of how he met their mom. Geranium, who worked part-time at a clinic, thought that he was "too cool" for Flulu and that she and Rhett would get together since both of them are tough fighters, but he fell in love with her when he took care of her after she got injured in an attack. They then applied to work at the Stratospheric together, though Flulu only wanted to "get off [Earth] before anything", but she didn't realize her love for Geranium until they were in space.
• Humanity on Trial: A prominent theme in the game, but also a literal possibility, if the MC and friends can convince the alien Hanging Judge to give them a shot at coexistence.
• Humans Are Warriors: A big part of the story is the effect humanity has on nature, for better or for worse. The first time xenofauna attack Strato, an Empathy check against one of them will reveal it is afraid of you, a mere ten-year-old child. And with good reason, because the Combat check to kill it is not hard. In one of the darker routes through the story, Strato concocts an extinction plague less than a decade after landing on the planet.
• Imagine the Audience Naked: The protagonist tries imagining the audience in their underwear if they struggle with performing a dramatic reading for the Vertumnalia Talent Show, but they stammer and stumble over their words and fail.
• Improvised Weapon:
  • If Sol goes to Geoponics during the first Glow attack, they grab a shovel to use as a weapon.
  • The illustration depicting Anemone and Kombucha facing the Faceless after its attack on the colony has been going on for a while shows Anemone holding a rake.
• Insistent Terminology: Sometimes, you can see Tangent taking a nap, and when you wake her up, she'll insist that she wasn't sleeping and that "it is crucial to rest the eyes, to maintain adequate moisture levels."
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Right from the start of the game, there is a meter tracking how much your character rebels against the colony. A meter which would not be there unless rebellion was important to the story at some point.
  • Players who regularly check the gallery during their first playthrough are bound to get spoiled:
    • The backgrounds associated with the Helio colony appear there as soon as Sol gets a random Flash Forward that uses them and are given labels that include the colony's name.
    • Most of the still-locked "Cheevos" (achievements) have names that are roundabout enough to only make sense once the player has run into the event to which they relate. Maxing out friendship with one of the romance options will unlock an achievement named after them. Not only is one the romance options Permanently Missable Content for players who neglect exploration, another dies way too early into the first playthrough for their friendship to get anywhere near maxed out.
• It's Up to You: The Player Character's actions will make the difference between the colony surviving and being wiped out, and they're the only one who can save many lives. Some of that is because of their visions giving them information from other lives, but not all; sometimes they're just able to pull off something that the colony's adults can't manage because they're the protagonist. One example of the latter is that both studying biology and researching xenobotany have events that can't progress without materials found outside the colony, but Sol has to take shifts with the surveyors to obtain them on their own rather than ask the people heading out anyway to do so. Once the materials are obtained, they won't be properly exploited unless Sol at least participates in researching them.
• Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films: In Tammy's three-heart event, she cries because she got nightmares after watching the 2085 remake of Mothra vs. Godzilla at the lounge. If her father dies, she also laments that he made her feel safe from the "monsters" and that she misses him.
• Killer Rabbit: Some of the xenofauna of Vertumna look cute, but they're still vicious creatures:
  • Manticores are pink goopy-looking creatures, but their spikes and height make it abundantly clear that they're not on your side.
  • Hopeyes are cute little rabbit-kangaroo-mouse hybrids...and when their nests are threatened, can swarm to kill anyone who threatens them.
  • Vriki are small, adorable spider-like creatures with mushrooms growing on their heads and many tentacles, but while the babies mostly don't eat anything bigger than fruit and insects, they come in swarms and can devour you if you disturb them.
    Screw spiders, even cute ones.
• Last-Second Word Swap: If you tell your mom what you've learned for the day, she'll compliment you for "getting your sh— I mean head together."
• Level-Up at Intimacy 5: Friendship Moments often reward the MC with powerful cards, and successfully dating someone after maxing out their heart meter also gives them the Smitten status, which increases all Social Skill gains by 1 for three months. Additionally, going out on dates reduces the MC's stress.
• Magikarp Power: Your starter cards based on your babyhood memories and your Bio-Augmentation start out being worth 0 points, but they can be upgraded into more powerful cards at the Garrison Gym, which is unlocked by the 2nd Toughness perk.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: One of the nighttime guard duty events has the MC catch Anemone and Vace sneaking out to have sex in the commons when Anemone was supposed to be on-duty. The MC can be aroused, disgusted, or — if they had feelings for any of the characters involved — heartbroken.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Every character in the game has an astonishingly apropos name. Some of them go by nicknames that play on other aspects of their personality.
    • Aspartame is named after an artificial sweetener that is much sweeter than normal sucrose, fitting for a kind and caring lady.
    • Dysthymia is named after a form of chronic depression and is the most clear and open case of a depression sufferer among the cast. Dys muses on what an odd thing that is to name a child after, and consequently fears that he was a contributing factor to his mother's suicide.
    • Anemone is named not just after a sea creature, but also a brightly-colored flower, which is sometimes called the "windflower" because its dead petals fly everywhere, appropriate for a spirited young girl who loves playing sportsball.
    • "Basorexia" means "a compulsive desire to kiss". Rex is all about physical affection, is a flirt towards the protagonist, and enjoys big hugs from them. His nickname is also a Stock Animal Name for dogs and his Bio-Augmentation makes him a Little Bit Beastly dog.
    • An antecedent is something that goes before another item in a series. Auntie Seedent's duties largely include raising the next generation of colonists.
    • "Congruence" means "agreement or harmony; compatibility", and in mathematics, congruent lines are equal in length, fitting for an A.I. who keeps the ship running in order.
    • The commander of the Heliopause goes by "Lum", associated with light. His full name, Baculum, is significantly less flattering, much like the disconnect between his public persona and actual personality. Since "baculum" means "penis bone", and he turns out to be a corrupt governor underneath his charisma, his full name means that he's a dick.
  • Lum says in his speech for the 8th Vertumnalia Festival that Vertumna is named after Vertumnus, the Roman god of cultivation, which is why he plans to clear its land for farming.
• Mini-Game: Stat checks take the form of a card-sorting minigame. The rules are a little like Uno; you're dealt some cards from your deck, and you can get bonus points by placing similar cards next to each other and/or forming an upward count with their numbers. The harder the challenge, the more points will be required to clear it. Sidequests reward the player with higher-value cards.
• Mix-and-Match Critters:
  • The unisaur looks sort of like an antelope, except it has small forearms like a tyrannosaur, a single curved horn, and a long brushlike tail.
  • The hopeye is a giant kangaroo mouse with purple fur, several eyes and the behaviour of a rabbit (living in groups, thumping its feet to warn of danger).
• Modular Epilogue: The game typically ends on your 20th birthday, and the epilogue explains how your and your friends' lives turn out in adulthood. The job you get depends on the activity you did the most and your highest associated stat, while your friends' fates are based on your choices in certain paths and whether or not you're dating them. You then live to a ripe, old age, and in your Dying Dream, your ancient self offers to take you back in time to start a new life and see how different it would turn out.
• Money Spider: Successful stat tests can reward the MC with kudos, even when there's nobody around and the situation is one completely unrelated to money.
• Monster Compendium: The bestiary of Vertumnan fauna, which provides a brief summary of the alien creatures you encounter on the planet, can be viewed at any time at the expedition outpost.
• Multiple Endings: There are 29 possible endings, all of which can be collected in the gallery. They depend on the job you get at the end of the game, but there are special endings depending on the choices you make in the main story.
  • The "Standard" Ending: Vertumnan xenofauna will always attack your colony every Glow Season, but despite the uncertainty of humanity's survival, you and your friends continue to fight for the colony in the years to come.
  • The "Ran Away" Ending: You and Dys believe that the colony is seriously harming the planet and you can't do anything about it, so you help him set off the bomb near its walls and then run away with him, never to return. As per Dys's promise, you die with him in the wilderness by letting the predators consume you and return your remains to Vertumnan soil, and you eventually forget that you were even human.
• Mundane Luxury:
  • After landing, Geranium is delighted to experience changing seasons again.
  • A young Cal enjoys simply being able to play in mud after having grown up in a ship that recycled its water.
  • After the Heliopause lands, Marz is thrilled to be able to talk to people who haven't been part of her life since the day she was born.
  • Nomi-Nomi enjoys simply being outside.
• Mundane Made Awesome: If Sol is nonbinary when first meeting Nomi-Nomi, it's possible for the two to exchange the "secret nonbinary high-five"... Which is described as "like a regular high-five, pretty much".
• Mushroom Samba: Blep tea, brewed from a native grass, is mildly hallucinogenic. A biologist MC can experiment with making a more potent form of the beverage, which will send either Tangent, Cal, or the MC completely to space. They decide that the experiment and results were educational and fun but probably not something that should be widely reproduced.
• New Game Plus: Starting over a new life carries over any information you've learned about your friends in your past life, but you have to encounter them again to unlock them on your friend list. The prologue gets an additional memory of a chosen favorite gift received on your fourth birthday, which serves as your starting gear besides the Sun Medallion, and of your dad regularly reading you a story of your choice, which gives you a bonus card.
• No Biochemical Barriers: One possible blurb of text from working in the xenobontany lab mentions that the adults born on Earth anticipated the possibility of life on Vertumna being more exotic to them than it turned out to be. In practice:
  • The trope is played straight with Vertumna's atmosphere, which is perfectly breathable for humans.
  • On the disease side, the Shimmer affects humans despite having evolved to affect the local wildlife.
  • Things are a little more realistic when it comes to using the local wildlife as a food source, as Congruence needs to run tests to account for both short-term and long-term dangers. The colony also runs into its first Alien Catnip species a few years in.
• Nocturnal Emission: The protagonist gets this when they're 13 if the player selects the corresponding puberty option for them. They vaguely recall having an "exciting" dream the other night when they stained the bed, and if they do their laundry, their dad comes in to tell them that it's okay to "feel a little wet behind the ears".
• Non-Heteronormative Society: While the situation on Earth is unclear beyond bigotry being mentioned among its rampant problems, sexual and gender diversity exists in the colony without being treated as anything remarkable:
  • When it comes to Sol, pronouns, gender presentation and biological sex are completely separate choices, with non-binary options for all three (there is a No Biological Sex option). All their peers are available for romance regardless of the choices made.
  • Tang first appears at age 9, having already undergone her physical transition via gene therapy. There is also a known non-binary adult in the colony, Seeq.
  • Marz is raised by a pair of gay fathers, while Cal has four parents due to his mother being part of a polyamorous relationship.
  • Nomi-Nomi grew up as the only non-binary person on the Heliopause, but they mention that people just got used to it over the years if asked about their gender during the first proper conversation with them. The issues they mention running into while growing up all seem to have been caused by having a personality at odds with that of the rest of the ship rather than their gender.
• No-Paper Future: Averted. Despite the Strato crew being bio-augmented with holographic palms, Eudicot and Seeq miss the feel of paper and still use it after landing on Vertumna. They plan to cut down the local trees to make paper out of them. Congruence also teaches her students pen-and-paper handwriting in Humanities class to teach them low-tech solutions in case their technology breaks down. Nomi-Nomi is also found drawing on paper during one of their events. Children also don't get holopalms before a certain age, so any drawing the youngest ones do is on paper.
• Notice This: Collectible items glow the same way as random event spots outside the colony, but your Perception skill must be at least 33 in order to unlock this perk. Before this, even the collectible getting a white outline requires being right next to it, just like overworld sprites and the entrances of buildings. However, a first-time player can easily mistake a collectible for a background element and thus not go out of their way to approach it.
• Odd Friendship: Tammy, the sweeter-than-sugar Nice Girl who wants to be a prolific mother and baker, and Marz, the arrogant Alpha Bitch who wants to run the colony someday, are actually pretty good friends. Marz is also somehow good friends with Tangent, who's a walking case of Acting Your Intellectual Age.
• Odd Name, Normal Nickname: Everyone, save for the protagonist if the player invokes Aerith and Bob when they name them, has a name that isn't normally used as a "conventional" name. However, some of them go by nicknames that sound like "traditional" names such as "Cal" for Recalcitrance, "Anne" for Antecedent, and "Tammy" for Aspartame.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • The Stratospheric's crash-landing on Vertumna and the two weeks of struggle that followed it are not shown, because the MC was rendered comatose during the first few minutes.
  • Some of the fights that Sol gets to join during Glow attacks if they have enough Bravery come with the implication that some non-combatants are managing to hold their own off-screen in timelines in which Sol can't join those very same fights.
• Oh, My Gods!: Flulu swears by the stars, and Tangent by Newton's apple. Apparently, the latter is more rude.
• Only Shop in Town: Starting from the second Vertumnalia Festival, the Strato crew opens the Supply Depot, the first and only shop of the colony. You can spend your Kudos there for special cards, and gaining certain perks by increasing certain skills unlocks new items in stock.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Hal teaches basic classes in everything, from biology to engineering. It helps that he has an AI assistant, and his students are only ten-year-olds; he mentions that when they go into advanced classes, things will be different.
• Oracular Urchin: The main character ends up like this after a few playthroughs, haunted by prophetic dreams of the traumas their alternate selves have endured.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: The wormhole leading to Vertumna is what gives the MC their precognition. At some point in their timeline, they merged with a psychedelic/psychic Vertumnal megafauna at the perihelion of the planet's orbit around the wormhole, shredding their consciousness across every single possible moment of any theoretical incarnation of their own life. It is possible to use the precognitive abilities this manifests as from any individual MC's POV to sacrifice the Stratospheric to collapse the wormhole, "ending" the time loop.^note You can let yourself back into the loop by asking yourself nicely.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Downplayed. Religion is never criticized because it's never mentioned at all- the setting is entirely secular. There's no chapels on the spaceship, for example, and funerals focus on the deceased person's importance to their planet and community rather than any kind of religious viewpoint. It's closer to Author Appeal than an Author Tract.
• Overly Long Name: The author of Life Beyond the Einstein-Rosen Ridge, which inspired the formation of the Vertumna Group and the colonization of the alien planet, is named Planktonic Ascendance Wang-Botha-Schmidt.
• Permanently Missable Content: Babysitting is only available if you save Tammy, but you can only take the job in the first four years because the creche gets permanently destroyed in the Faceless attack at the end of Year 5.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Conversed by Tammy when she's pregnant with Echinacea. She remembers when babies used to be swaddled in pink blankets for girls and blue ones for boys, but she thinks it's ridiculous.
• Planimal: Many of Vertumna's creatures. For example, the bushbub is a giant tortoise whose 'shell' is a bush that helps them camouflage. Bushbub berries are edible, but harvesting them is not easy.
• Please Put Some Clothes On:
  • You can tell Rex to put a shirt on the first time you see him shirtless, but he'll complain that he took it off because it's hot outside. He'll also consider going pantsless.
  • During his nine-heart event, Cal steps in front of a humidity sprinkler with his shirt tied to his waist to let the water spray on him, trying to impress you with his muscles, but you can tell him to put his shirt back on because he's "blinding" you.
• Polyamory: Cal has four parents in all: his mother Tirah and her three partners (at least two of which are her boyfriends, Ceph and Perk), and they all work together to take care of him.
• Poor Communication Kills: Dys and Tangent's sibling relationship completely disintegrates due to this. She thinks he doesn't accept her gender transition, he thinks she hates and patronizes him for not being intelligent. In reality, Dys has no problem with Tangent being transgender and Tangent is genuinely concerned for her brother's safety and well-being, but their mutual inability to express their feelings all but completely severs the twins' bond.
• Pop Quiz: Rhett quizzes you on the Vertumnan xenofauna at one point during guard duty. He won't punish you for getting it wrong, but you'll earn Kudos if you get it right.
• Population Control: In order to control the colony's population, having a child requires permission from the Council, and there haven't been any babies born since the Stratospheric landed on Vertumna, with the last one born shortly before the ship passed through the wormhole. If Tammy is saved, she eventually gets pregnant at 19 and gives birth to Echinacea, the first child born on Vertumna.
• Precision F-Strike: Geranium, who, according to the protagonist, rarely swears, says "shit" upon learning that the pixie bean feast he cooked up for the 4th Vertumnalia Festival made the young teens crash after a burst of hyperactivity.
• Psycho Pink: The game takes place on Vertumna, an alien planet where the predominant colours are pink and purple. Possibly because it's the garden planet of an alien race, who are very hostile to humanity. Native fauna includes the manticore, a predator which stands as tall as a horse and consists almost entirely of pink spikes. Plasrifle blasts barely leave a mark on it.
• Pull a Rabbit out of My Hat: For the 4th Vertumnalia Festival, Dys attempts this magic trick by pulling a hopeye out of his hat, but as soon as he removes his hat, the hopeye falls out and bounces away, embarrassing him onstage.
• Pun:
  • Cal cracks one the first time you tend to the animals with him, which he got from your dad:
    "I herd you're gonna help out with the animals! Get it? Herd?"
  • One of the MC blurbs for having extra fingers states that they come in handy.
• Puppy Love: The other kids know that Cal and Tammy are going to end up together, and tease them about it.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: The MC's gender, pronouns, and presentation can not only be chosen, but changed instantaneously whenever the player wants. This is somewhat justified, as the setting has very advanced gender-changing procedures and progressive norms.
• Queer Establishing Moment:
  • For Tangent, this moment can come as early as considering her as a childhood friend and reading the mention of her having undergone genome treatment to make her body conform to her gender. If that part gets skipped due to only considering other children, a piece of her random dialog during her late childhood has her comment that her puberty seems to be going a little differently from that of people who were born with a female set of hormones.
  • As Seeq is non-binary, the player knows as soon as the first time their pronouns appear in dialog.
  • If Sol asks Nomi-Nomi about their gender when they first meet them, the latter will say that they're just glad that the Strato colony has "not-boy, not-girl people" like Seeq, revealing that they're nonbinary like them. If they and Rex are mistaken for having started dating, they mention not liking anyone "that way" and instead regarding Rex like a brother, establishing their asexuality. They also have a piece of random dialog that establishes this, via mentioning being grossed out at the idea of "getting involved" with someone else. If Sol pursues them as a love interest, Nomi-Nomi will realize that they might be demisexual instead, having felt "something more" for them after bonding with them.
• Railroading:
  • Even if the MC maxes out their Relationship Values with Anemone, she always hooks up with Vace by the time the characters turn 16 no matter how much she appears to reciprocate the MC's feelings beforehand. Unless the MC specs their stats right and/or finds definitive proof that Vace is a scumbag, Anemone will angrily reject the MC if they confess to her, saying it's too late and that she's happy with Vace despite him being abusive towards her.
  • When Lum orders everyone in the Council to take on an official second-in-command, Cal will be made Second Cultivator over Geranium, who is already considered the unofficial Second Cultivator. The latter fact gets pointed out by Cal himself. This is the result of the fact that it's entirely possible for Geranium to be either dead or Chief Cultivator by that point and makes one less alternative late-game scenario to account for.
  • A couple of characters whose lives can be saved by Sol's actions will step down from their respective positions soon after and hand the positions over to the characters who take over if they die. This results in the replacements being around for the same events regardless of playthrough.
• Raised by the Community: All adults taking part in raising the children is the norm in the Strato colony. Blood ties only matter in terms of sharing family bedrooms and being the prime decision-maker when it comes to the child's life. Several situations show the subtleties of the system:
  • Tang and Dys, who are orphaned twins, still have an adult in the colony who is considered their prime caretaker.
  • Upon finding out that children in older times had to do Egg Sitting as a deterrent to reproducing too early, the Player Character doesn't understand the deterrent aspect due to taking for granted the idea that a child's biological parents wouldn't be the only ones caring for them.
  • The colony is noted to have some children who live in the daycare full-time. A random blurb from babysitting mentions that they consist of orphans, children whose parents decided to take take the communal child-rearing further than others and Anne's own three youngest sons, who are triplets.
• Relationship Values: You can track your relationships with the romanceable characters in your friend list. You can improve your relationships with them by giving them gifts and bonding with them until you max out their meters at 10 hearts. As you bond with them, you unlock more details on their profiles, including sliders that tell you more precisely about their personalities.
• Reset Button: The MC appears in their own dying dream as an incredibly elderly version of themself, who offers the chance to experience another possible lifetime and some hints as to what major events (usually character deaths) might turn out differently. Even if the player has prevented every possible death, forged a lasting peace between humans and nature, or destroyed the cycle entirely, the ancient MC simply remarks that there is more to be done and offers their hand to begin again.
• Ret-Gone: Exposing the Stratospheric to the wormhole un-shielded detonates the ship's reactor and the ensuing blast collapses the wormhole, retroactively unmaking the entire plot, leading to a timeline where there is no escape from a dying Earth. The Vertumna Group makes a go at establishing a compound on Earth, but they are eventually overrun by desperate refugees. Restarting at this point leads to an endless loop of the "Life on Earth" ending until the player asks the ancient MC to undo their actions.
• Romance Sidequest: The options for flirting with the dateable characters are clearly marked so you can skip them, and you can still earn them on the title screen by maxing out their heart meters regardless.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • Cal and Tammy need to be separated for Sol to become long-term partners with either of them. They are both loving and harmonious as a couple, unlike the other pair that needs to be broken up for Sol to have a chance with either half. As it happens, players aiming to make Cal Sol's husband technically have a second option that those aiming to make Tammy their wife don't: letting Tammy die a few months after the beginning of the game, which has ethical issues of its own, but also can't be avoided during the very first playthrough and takes a single choice to repeat on subsequent ones.
  • If the famine happens and Sol doesn't manage to end it, they will have at least one opportunity to obtain extra food with the full knowledge that it's being taken away from someone else who needs it. However, stealing food deducts from your food supply since Sol still feels bad for it, but at least you'll get a card for it.
• Same-Sex Triplets: Anemone's three younger brothers are triplets.
• Scavenger World: The colony is gradually degrading into a manual society. This is because they brought tech with them from the ship, but it will be a long time before they know Vertumna's resources well enough to get that technology repaired or make new stuff.
• Scenery Porn: Vertumna is a lovingly detailed world of pastel shades, lush foliage and adorable (if dangerous) animals. The settled parts of it are no less beautiful, being filled with cushions, colorful banners, and natural light.
• Schrödinger's Gun: Quite a few elements of the plot are clearly adapting to player choices:
  • Jobs, classes and relaxing activities are done in one-month blocks, but each of Sol's peers can be part of events exclusive to several different activities, resulting in what they are doing during some months adapting to whatever Sol is doing. For example, all three classes have events involving Tangent, but seeing any event involving her implies that she just happens to be taking a specific class at the same time as Sol, regardless of when Sol is taking the class. Another example is biology classes, which Cal will sometimes happen to be taking at the same time as both Sol and Tangent rather than working in Geoponics, his usual workplace.
  • Some events simply don't happen if Sol doesn't find out about them. The artificial plague meant to kill all local wildlife will never come up if Sol doesn't befriend Tangent and the fleet from Earth will be a non-entity unless Sol works as the governor's assistant often enough to eventually walk in on Lum during a specific conversation.
• Schrödinger's Question:
  • Sol's name and Bio-Augmentation (or lack thereof) are decided via player input and become what was there all along.
  • An early event involving Tammy has the player choose what her relationship with Sol was growing up between a playmate, a study partner and someone to whom they were mean. Their answer impacts what Sol is offered to do with her.
  • Some of Sol's birthdays have the player pick Sol's favorite gift among several, with said gift becoming the only one that is converted into a card.
  • Sol's biological sex isn't established until right before they start puberty, via asking the player what aspect of a past sex ed lecture was relevant to them, four years into the game.
• Science Fair: You can compete against Tangent and Tammy if you save her in one during the Vertumnalia Festival if you have enough Reasoning. One year, you can beat Tang with a twist on the baking soda volcano experiment.
• Secret Pet Plot: Cal secretly takes in an insectoid xenofauna, whom he names "Socks" during his childhood. If they regularly work in geoponics, Sol can potentially tell the adults as soon as they find out or get involved in the animal's care. Socks eventually grows out of being able to eat the food Cal provides her with and leaves on her own.
• She Is All Grown Up: During the Vertumnan Youth Ball on their 17th birthday, the protagonist is surprised by how much their friends have blossomed from awkward teens to attractive adults that they could "hardly recognize some of them."
• Shout-Out:
  • The old Earth teen magazine that Marz reads during her five-heart event contains a passage that references The Wizard of Oz:
    Don't be afraid to use green concealer! You may look like the Wicked Witch at first, but don't click your heels and go home! Stick with it and you'll be on that yellow brick road to clear, beautiful skin.
  • Two of the suggested names for the hopeye you can hatch from its egg are Hoptimus Prime and Hop Solo.
  • Similarly, options for the unisaur you can tame include Clever Girl and Twilight Sparkle.
  • The caption for the unlockable image of a manticore attacking Tonin is "Attack on Tonin."
  • One of Nomi-Nomi's events involves talking to them some time after they have discovered a series exclusive to the Stratospheric's archive that they really like only got its finale after the ship left Earth. One of Sol's possible answers to this is "Sounds rough, buddy", which reads suspiciously close Zuko's famous "That's rough, buddy" line from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
  • If Sol tries to hide and observe after Rhett tells them to return to the creche during the second Glow attack, they bump into Kom, who reiterates Rhett's advice all while ironically calling them "Naruto."
  • Anemone has two reasons to not like "Annie" as a nickname for herself. One is that her mother, Antecedent, already goes by "Anne." The other is the potential association with a well-known fictional Annie.

• Spin the Bottle: While high on pixie beans, which have an intoxicating effect, the community's teens can decide to play spin the bottle, though the MC can suggest playing Seven Minutes in Heaven instead.
• Status Buff: Certain story choices and events positively affect how much you gain certain skills for several months:
  • Clear Mind: At zero stress, you feel completely relaxed, giving you a 10% chance to get a bonus point in skill gains.
  • Smitten: Dating someone increases all social skill gains by 1 for three months.
  • Enlightened: Mastering a skill increases all mental skill gains by 1 for three months.
  • Heroic: Joining the fight during Glow attacks makes you feel pumped, increasing all physical skill gains by 1 for three months.
  • Popular: Winning a Vertumnalia contest doubles your Kudos earnings for three months.
• Status Effects: Certain story choices and events negatively affect how much you gain certain skills for several months:
  • Stressed Out: At maximum stress, you can't work or explore outside the colony, and you can only spend the month off relaxing to fully de-stress.
  • Feud: Getting into a major fight with someone reduces all social skill gains by 1 for three months.
  • Insomnia: You lose sleep after having a particularly bad dream on your 19th birthday, reducing all mental skill gains by 1 for three months.
  • Injured: Getting hurt in battle reduces all physical skill gains by 1 for six months, but your injuries can be healed by relaxing.
  • Starving: When the famine hits the colony, you end up hungry, reducing all physical skill gains by 1 until the colony gets enough food.
  • In Mourning: The death of a loved one such as Tammy and your parents reduces all skill gains by 1 for three months. You also can't give gifts to your friends or go exploring.
  • Hormones: Once you hit puberty, your raging hormones triple all Rebellion gains for nine months.
  • Grounded: If you get caught sneaking out to explore the colony outskirts, you're banned from exploring and all Loyalty gains are doubled for three months.
• Stink Snub: Marz often expresses her disdain towards Dys by complaining that he stinks. The player can choose to have Sol join in, with one such occasion unlocking a card called "being a bully." There is an implied kernel of truth to this, as Dys spends his days sneaking out of the colony via a drainpipe, while Marz refuses to go out in bad weather out of fear for the state of her clothes.
• Story Difficulty Setting: The card challenges can be turned off to focus more on the story, and the success of each activity is instead determined by a coin flip based on your age and skills.
• Super Breeding Program: When Sol's generation gets close to later teens, Tang starts crunching the numbers for the colony's prospective genetic diversity. She notices that while the presence of the Heliopause crew means that overall diversity will be even less of a problem than anticipated, the future population has a very high chance of ending up with a high rate of hereditary heart disease if people are left to their own devices. This can be avoided with careful planning over several generations, resulting in a brief exchange over the ethics of such a plan. The trope is outright deconstructed when Tang refuses to contribute her own genetic material to the next generation and people bemoan the fact that her intellect won't be transmitted, while the choice has to do with her not wanting to perpetuate her family's established history of mental illness.
• Surprise Party: Your friends organize one for you for your 18th birthday, with Marz as the host. You play along with the surprise because you're tired from the siege last Glow Season, but the Helios youth crash the party because they think they can sit "wherever [they] want" at the lounge, to Cal's frustration. In subsequent runs, you see the surprise party coming thanks to your Past-Life Memories, but you can still attend by pretending to be surprised.
• Sympathetic P.O.V.: Your Player Character was raised in the Stratospheric commune and sharing their values, so the game initially presents ideals such as vegetarianism, communal childrearing, and anti-capitalism as simple truth. However, the game also shows that these ideals appear to be natural because that's how you were raised, and your character has the opportunity to question and oppose many of them in favor of other systems.
• Talent Contest: You can compete against Marz and Dys in one during the Vertumnalia Festival with enough Creativity, and you can choose between up to three different talent acts to try winning in it.
• The Talk: Marz mentions that her dads taught her about reproduction when she was growing up, but were invoked "squicked out" when she asked them how to get someone to "actually have sex" with her.
• Theme Twin Naming: In a case of theme triplet naming, Anemone's triplet younger brothers are named Cirrus, Cumulus and Nimbus, which are all cloud types.
• There Are No Therapists: The Stratospheric only had one therapist, the mother of Dys and Tang who died before the events of the game. However, if Sol helps Rex build his bar, they can take up a job as a bartender, helping people through their issues as best they can without any specialized training. Should Dys and Tang be reconciled, Tang becomes a fierce advocate of mental health, albeit mostly through genetic alterations rather than therapy.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: In general, the only thing that travels through time is memories of the future. However, this isn't a hard rule; sometimes you can do something that physically affects the past, since when you destroy the wormhole, that causes it to be retroactively destroyed, preventing the story from happening. Also, the transcendent Sol is able to move around through time, though they usually only appear at the end of Sol's life.
• Toilet Humor:
  • Tangent's presentation for the science fair at the first Vertumnalia Festival involves using the hydroconversion machine for other benefits besides making urine drinkable. Despite her saying the word "pee" many times, the protagonist finds Tang's presentation boring.
  • During the 4th Vertumnalia Festival, Geranium serves pixie beans, the first domesticated Vertumnan crop, which glows in the dark. Flulu jokes that the community will have to thank him for the "light show in [their] toilets tonight."
  • One time during work at the Supply Depot, Tangent feels embarrassed when she asks the protagonist to get her "fart pills" for her upset stomach. Marz then teases her that she got a bad case of "Bluegut", when she farts blue dust and stains her pants with it, and she makes her check her own butt, to her dismay.
  • If the event during which Seeq makes Sol deliver a paper report to the rest of the Council happens after Utopia has become Chief Surveyor, Utopia's reaction to getting a paper report includes wondering if Eudicot plans to reintroduce toilet paper next.
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: Some of the jobs Sol can take are explicitly offered by people so desperate for extra hands that they will take any applicant who isn't horribly underqualified. The job for tutoring the younger children can be allegedly taken on by "anyone who isn't a complete idiot."
• Trailers Always Spoil: The game's launch trailer spoils some major plot points by showing CGs of Tammy being saved from her early death and Anemone and Kom fighting the Faceless.
• Uncoffee: Blep tea, which gets its name from how bitter it is, but is still quite popular as a stimulant. It also has an Alien Catnip side to it, as an event in which a more potent variant is researched has Sol hesitate between giving it to someone who prefers the stimulant aspect and someone who prefers the drug-like aspect.
• Urine Trouble: While exploring the Western Wresting Ridge, you may feel a light shower even if the place is normally arid. If you look up, you'll realize that it's coming from migrating floatcows that are urinating to keep themselves afloat.
• Used Future: A cozier example than most. The Strato colony was a personal project by people who didn't fit in on Earth, so their ship is low-tech, relatively small, and communal ^note families share a bedroom, and all living spaces are public. Think "visible bolts and worn cream paint" rather than "smooth white plastic". Apparently they stole a much more advanced A.I for the project.
• Veganopia: That was the original ideal of the Stratospheric's people. However, when they actually arrive on their new home, most of their food reserves and the soil needed to grow more are destroyed (unless the PC takes a very specific route), and as a result, hunting and ranching become part of their lifestyle even before the Heliopause arrives.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: There are choices that let you be mean to your friends, but notably, you can bully Tammy into losing her confidence. This is the only way to separate her from Cal after saving her.
• Video Game Delegation Penalty: The Targeting Autohelm autoplays your best hand during card challenges, but deducts 2 points from all card values.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • Even though humans are sapient and can be reasoned with, the Gardeners are absolutely correct about the damage they will do to the environment given the chance.
  • Although it's told from the perspective of the descendants of the Vertumna Group on Earth, the history of the movement includes a line about others fearing that they were a cult breeding supersoldiers using genetech. That wasn't the group's intention, but they were a cult and they do use their genetech to create "superior" children.
• Weird Weather: "Sparksnow" on Vertumna is like the Earth kind of snow, except that it's blue, not cold, and mildly acidic. Good for sculpting, though.
• We Used to Be Friends: The children of the Stratospheric weren't always nice to each other, but they were raised together, in an environment where no other peers existed. Yet they would develop such drastically different political views that this closeness couldn't last. Cal and Anemone, in particular, get along well as kids, but after Anemone joins the military in her teens, she and Cal separate because of their differing views, with Cal believing in pacifism and Anemone believing in fighting to protect the colony.
• Whale Egg: Hopeyes lay eggs despite being the Fantastic Fauna Counterpart to various rodents. However, Vertumnan wildlife has quite porous lines between plant, fungus, animal and mineral, so a being analogous to a mammal laying eggs is nowhere near the strangest thing the planet is harboring.
• Wham Episode: The fifth year's Glow and the sixth year's Quiet. The Glow attack destroys all but one of the Strato buildings and the casualties include one of Anemone's brothers regardless of run and Eudicot unless the player actively prevents it. While the colony is still being rebuilt, a second spaceship from Earth crashes on Vertumna. Said spaceship contains a bunch of soldiers whose pre-crash purpose was clearly to arrest the Strato residents. Once things have settled down, the colony has a new governor in the form of the second ship's captain, all functions have shifted locations and there are three extra people close to Sol's age who can be interacted with.
• What Does She See in Him?: One time during guard duty, Vace impresses Anemone by arrogantly firing some shots during target practice. You can tell Anemone, "What do you see in this dingus?" but Vace will shoot an acidic glance at you while Anemone will grab him by the arm and tell him not to worry about you, which deducts 2 points from their respective heart meters.
• Who's on First?: The Secret Pet Plot involving Cal starts with both he and Sol being in the barn in which he's keeping the pet when it hatches. Cal always names the pet "Socks." It it's at least Sol's second time living through the event, they can respond to finding Cal looking at an unseen item he's keeping inside a crate by asking if it's Socks. Since Socks isn't hatched quite yet at that point and it's always the first time from Cal's point of view, a bemused Cal asks why he would be keeping his socks in a barn.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: You need to keep the colony's food supply well-stocked or else you'll end up starving, which decreases all physical skill increases by 1, and as of the October 6, 2022 update, cake will also no longer be in stock at the Supply Depot.
• Wrongfully Committed: If the MC makes a regular habit of discussing their dreams around the colony and insisting on their predictive power, they will eventually be committed to care for a psychotic disorder by Instance. They will be forced to take medication that wipes all their Past-Life Memories, thus deleting all choices that are only available after the first playthrough.
• X-Ray Sparks: The Vertumnan wildlife have skeletons that light up from within when they're zapped by the security officers with their lightning gloves.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Whilst many tragedies can be avoided the MC notes that in all their lives they've never prevented the destruction of the Stratos and Kom's death in the Faceless attack at the end of year 5.

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