Playing the game felt like satire. Basic questions I would expect other devs of sci-fi games to ask themselves seemingly either went unanswered or got super lazy answers.
e.g. “Should we let players customize their spaceships?” to which HG apparently thinks their system of solely generating ships from a random permutation of parts is plenty. Or “Do you think different planets and galaxies would have different hostile flora?”, to which they decided “nah, the same 3 are fine everywhere”. “Should planets have biomes of any kind, at least ice caps maybe?”… “nah, players don’t care if planets are basically uniform.”