So, I selected "No" to recommend, but I want to be clear that this is because of the binary yes/no option Steam gives me. If I had like a scoring system I'd given this somewhere between 3-4 out of 5. It's got a lot of greatness to it, but what it also has are a lot of little drawbacks which when added up make the game less fun.
By way of metaphor this game was about as enjoyable as a cake that was pulled out of the oven just a little too soon. Its structure is there, and you can eat around the undercooked center and be like "man, good stuff." But that cake isn't winning awards or going to please anyone's mom or birthday kid.
The world is cute, and a little goofy, and that works really well. I like how the game kinda brands itself as a just-enjoy kind of experience. Most of the actual gameplay is pretty easy, even on the "hardest" difficulty, which if you know going in means this is the kind of game you could play for the fun of it and/or for the worldbuilding. Lots of good things to say to the two Devs on that.
At the same time, there is just a lot to nit-pick at. Buggy and insanely slow movements while on planet, poor information relaying and retention, UI challenges - you quickly learn that this "chill" game has an steep learning curve since you need to basically do everything yourself without the benefit of any kind of tooltips (and the tutorial which bugs and crashes out). All the fun items with quirky names? You have to intuit what they do, if they do anything, and most of them just seem to give a small xp% boost over time to things like fishing or farming. So good luck figuring out what does what, you just have to guess or know from past experience. And outside of ship equipment and maybe weapons, "what does what" is kinda pointless since most items aren't going to be all that useful to you. I'd think some of them would help with space madness but nope. You have the passive worry about space madness, which requires you to pitstop at a planet - this is clever - but you have no way to know 1) which planet is populated other than looking for satellites or 2) the conditions on the planet before you land. So you beam down and find out it's full of roving monsters or whatnot, but also other SPUs who just seem to be chilling around. But you better put your suit on because you might die, even if they are in shirts and shorts. And if you "go inside" the mall you'll still need your suit AND can still be attacked while navigating the buy/sell screens.
Also, you don't get to choose where you beam down. Not a big deal given that planets aren't large, BUT the insanely slow movement speed means you're invested in just trying to find a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mall or town hall.
Once you've figured out (most) of what does what. you're pretty much set. You start off broke, but if you just harvest and sell all the resources on your starter planet and then passively invest you'll probably have enough to buy a mid-top tier ship within 2 game months + some tier 2 and tier 3 upgrades (which again you know are upgrades because of intuition, deduction, or buying and THEN seeing what the hell a thing does, since the game doesn't give you any kind of detail beyond some flavor text prior to buying). This could make the game ridiculously easy, but you still have to manage space madness and in principle avoid some parts of the galaxy. The waypoint system requires a lot more micromanaging than you'd expect from a game that branded itself as a chill experience though. But once you realize the only real limitation is managing space madness - which, because the litany of items don't really help with that (or if they do, you don't know because they don't tell you, like how a lot of this game works) you're hopping planet to planet (which is fine) but without any details about planets (not so fine) and just beaming down to be "somewhere" long enough to reduce space madness, then off you go again.
I haven't gotten to Lilith - the game crashed a few times and I was already feeling divested - and just don't feel the urge to; the game doesn't stick with me enough. That potential is there with some more polishing, some bug fixes and reworks of how the user interacts with and engages in the world. But right now it doesn't feel like a 1.0 even, and from what the Devs themselves have said this project is now just one of a few they're working on so even with their roadmap it's hard to say when it'll get to a better state of play. I wish them well, and will check in on this later to see if it's better in time.
