I think BoardBonobo's complaint isn't the lack of action, but the lack of clarity in direction. He doesn't know what to do. Getting killed within moments of starting a game is by-and-large a great turn-off, but he gave it a second chance. The key issue here is, "wandered around for a bit trying to figure out what to do." He had no idea how the game actually works, so is not able to stop himself dying. Similar to my experience with The Tomorrow Children where it was so unexplained that I had very little agency in the game.
That does go quite a bit against my seeing the game when it was first released, though. A friend had it Day 1 and it was fairly straightforward that there were resources obtained from the plants and rocks, and lots of pointers on what to do within the planet. There was enough air to get to the first outpost. I'd be interested to learn if BoardBonobo missed an in-game communication? There seems to be a change in human intelligence happening as software becomes more and more transparent in use that we are starting to expect everything to work exactly how we assume it does and don't process instructional info as well as we used to. Cues and pointers are more likely to get overlooked these days, I think, as players do their own thing and expect the game to work, thereby negating the need to pay attention to instruction.
