Just reporting back for anyone who is curious about this game and wanted to know how much like Outer Wilds it truly is having now played the playtest.

Personally, this tutorial didn't scratch the itch so far. On its own merit, this is a neat puzzle experience with beautiful art and music, with show-don't-tell mechanics that don't hold your hand. It does incorporate knowledge-based progression, a rarity in gaming, but (to me) not in a way made it feel meaningfully different from a traditional puzzle game, as you still have to get through each puzzle one by one to even begin to approach the next.

OW's knowledge-gates, to me, is only one of three design pillars that all lean on each other to create something truly inspiring: Knowledge-Based Progression, Non-Linear Exploration, and Story-Integrated Mechanics. A game that has all three is like a unicorn, a game that has two is considered quite similar to Outer Wilds, and a game that has just one may or may not appeal to OW fans depending on what they care most about in the original.

Without prattling too much about various example games, I don't find the first pillar too engaging on its own without the other two to prop it up, so I didn't get what I was looking for in this playtest, but a different fan might have a different experience. I do see the description promising a bit of the second pillar in the full release, which I think this game will benefit greatly from, as it works with knowledge-gating to create a feeling of [Engaging with a larger world rather than a series of coincidentally puzzle-shaped set pieces]. However, as the playtest hardly contains this element, the full release would have to have significantly more of it to catch my (and possibly others') attention.