I slept on playing Prospector’s demo for too long. However, I was able to sink a half dozen hours into it, seeing the full breadth of the available content to the best of my knowledge by waiting. So, maybe it wasn’t so bad. At least it’s not already released.
You get a small story blurb to set up the setting. It’s a hypercapitalist future, and you’re one of the people who go out to harvest other worlds for profit. Dropped onto your world, you’re partially tethered to your ship/pod/home for energy which powers your suit and your laser. You can explore beyond tether range, but you’ll slowly run out of oxygen (as best I can tell from the bars at the top, the UI isn’t fully explained iirc). You can build more tethers similar to Astroneer though, and so you begin exploring the island you’re on.
Similar to a lot of other survival crafting games set in the future, your laser is a multi-purpose tool. You’ll use it to break down trees and rocks into organic and mineral matter. There aren’t a lot of hostile creatures, so it’s a fairly chill bit of explore, build, and send resources back to the corp for money. After a number of shipments, you’ll also unlock additional blueprints to build more stuff. If you die, you’ll drop some stuff and respawn back at your ship/base. Most of my deaths were self-inflicted between starvation and drowning. As in most games, you eventually come to have tools or resources enough to solve those problems.
The game gives you little tastes of what’s to come in the quests you do, some communication with other worlds you can travel to and work on the same. Prospector itself is set to be released sometime in 2025, and the demo is still available.