[Aelinsaar]

If someone wrote a book that was as shallow as this game, it would be a $.99 affair on Amazon. No characters, no story to speak of, no meaningful interaction or progression, and I found that after a handful of planets, it was really clear how Mr. Potato-Head "The Game" worked.

I don't see how it's like reading, when a book offers you a story and then asks you to imagine accordingly, with something that offers you synthetic imagination and asks you to come up with a story.

[lotyrin]

I feel like this is a really good point. These "synthetic imagination" engines with thin plot are exactly backward. The human capacity for imagination is better than the machine's, but we seek novel narratives, something this could have provided but fell short.

[Aelinsaar]

Exactly, and the machine isn't telling a story, it's just running the numbers; something humans are very good at identifying given a bit of time. I'm not sure how cutting the scale way down, and adding some more human touches wouldn't have improved matters tremendously, but then, that would be a different developer skillset.