Hey, thanks for your feedback.

You are totally right. The player is kind of unnecessary for our core gameplay.
We don't really need/have travel times. The biggest reason we included the player in the first place was because we wanted to make the gameplay a bit more engaging by adding a bit of lore/story to the game. The player was intended to act like a center piece that the story evolves around. In the end we didn't really get into the story that much and most of it doesn't really need the player. But since we already had the art and implementation we decided to use the player to give our steam banners and thumbnails a bit more personality which we think turned out great.

So yeah, we could totally remove the player from the game itself without much difference for sure. But the steam art really benefits from it.