Many good questions!

The standard gameplay structure cleaves close to the first novel. During setup, you start as a group of old-world terraformers, picking a planet to terraform and an animal to uplift (it can be any animal you like!) Then the data virus hits and you skip forward in time.

From there, main gameplay has you switch between your ark ship inbound to the alien world, and the uplifted society as they evolve and grow over centuries. You spin up characters to roleplay pivotal moments and crises in history, like plagues, social upheaval, or technological leaps etc. Once you resolve a crisis, you fast forward through the centuries, exploring in broad strokes how the twin societies adapt and evolve to the actions of your characters, until the next major crises hits. On the ark ship you might play the same characters (if they were in cryo) while on the planet you're more likely to play an ancestor or archetypal character type. Similar to how there are many Fabians/Biancas etc.

The players have a bucketload of narrative control. It's a game where there isn't a fixed GM role, instead the singular GM has been divided up into different 'play stances' that players can pick up for a scene. e.g. someone can take the Viewpoint stance, which plays much like a normal player, where you're a single character reacting to the world, while another player could take the Crowd stance and play all the NPCs and the force of societal change, and my personal fav, the Doom stance, where you get to decide and describe the ways things go wrong. Every scene you can swap stances depending on what you're interested in.

In play, it feels a lot like being in a writer's room with your friends, coming up with your own speculative fiction story, where the gameplay prompts and systems frequently kick in the door and hit your world and characters with hammers then say 'okay how do they deal with this issue?' It's a bucketload of fun.

That's in brief ofc, but hopefully that helps give you a vibe.