nice

the animations where pretty good

As several people have already noted, it's not super intuitive to jump right in, so probably check out the linked guide. After a couple false starts, I had a solid run on the easiest difficulty.

I had a love-hate relationship with Stellaris back when it came out; I liked the exploration and building, but most of the combat and diplomacy stuff felt like it was getting in my way. The puzzle aspect of creating optimal routes in a finite amount of turns gives the game a lot of replayability.

Wishlisting the Steam version for sure (I like the look of it so far, but I would love to see an optional graphic setting where the game assets have the almost-minimal pixel charm of the pico8, but with the wider field of view and control)

A nice distillation of the gather & upgrade loop.

I had hoped to complete all the sequential objectives, but unfortunately I encountered a bug. While I was waiting for rare materials to respawn for a sequential objective, and as I was getting close to gathering all the materials for the anvil's final recipe, I experienced a bug where attempting to either drop or deposit (in a chest) a 99-stack of coal simply created a copy of the stack without removing it from my inventory, so I started to get choked for space and had to hurry up and finish crafting that recipe. Continuing into New Game Plus did not resolve the coal problem, so I was unable to do much at that point.

I don't know if that recipe was actually the end goal, as there were some materials I never had occasion to use, but based on the patch notes I assume there's a significant portion of the game that I didn't get to experience.

I enjoyed what amount I was able to play, but I don't currently feel like replaying all of that just to see what I missed.