I think this game succumbed to feature creep. There are so many different systems that don't seem to impact the game in a meaningful way. Day/night cycle, workers, roguelike progression, items-- any one of these could have made a good game but together they just interfere with each other. Even small things, such as needing to manually pick up fuel after the maggot dies-- it would have been a whole lot simpler if it just automatically refueled your ship. Everything was more complex than it needed to be for such a small game.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot here that I like. The art is really clean and the juice is really well done. However, the game just has too much going on and fails to motivate me to keep playing.