There’s a lot of good stuff in here, but I think some of it works against itself. Ordinarily I’m all for a game with a focus on dialogue and narrative, but since the tutorial itself is buried under an avalanche of unrelated dialogue, it’s very difficult to actually learn how to play the game. After figuring it out, I did enjoy flying around and fighting and the general gameplay loop is enjoyable, but the VN sections don’t feel like they contribute as much to the experience.
I tried not to at first, but I found myself skipping large portions of dialogue just because what was supposed to be a tutorializing conversation goes on multiple tangents and doesn’t actually end up explaining the new mechanic. It made it harder to get endeared to the characters when I was actively choosing not to read what they say. It’s a matter of personal taste but I also wasn’t very fond of some of the kinds of humor present in the game too, especially around the robot assistant.
As for the actual gameplay itself, farming resources is fun and the combat is good too. I especially like building the ship, and I think the hangar is the best part. I like how the shape of it has a real effect on how it handles and behaves when you’re flying it through space, and I REALLY like the tetris-esque aspect of getting all the weird hull shapes to fit together logically. But as good as the hangar is, the UX in that section definitely needs work. You can’t delete pieces or edit the behavior of an attachment if you’re holding a piece, and I couldn’t find a button to deselect what I was currently holding, so I needed to leave the hangar entirely and re-enter it just to interact with it properly. That UX flaw also I think will lead to players not understanding the collection mechanic, since it requires setting up the grabbers to react to meat in order to beat the first objective, and they get blocked from doing so while holding a spaceship part with their cursor.