It's not about how you treat it. It's about how the game presents itself. The game is telling you a thing and then it does something opposite. It feels like riding a train and suddenly the tracks stop and you have to walk through snow and mud to get on the next one, because they hadn't had time to make the tracks inbetween. At times you have to push the train, because the tracks are there, but there's no power.
And they did have about 6 million dollars in budget. The problem isn't that there's some crucial feature missing from the game, but that there's so many unfinished things and it feels like if they took extra 6 months bugfixing it'd be nearly perfect. I bet if they haven't spent so much money on famous voice actors they could've made it.
Or even simpler, they should've just stuck to their original plan of making it episodical.
Instead they went for an all-in-one and it really shows. Not only is it unfinished, but you can see, especially if you played the alpha/beta where some drastic design decisions were made. The most obvious the actual theme of the game. They went from making a story oriented game in an immersive environment to a survival micromanagement simulator with story elements in a sandbox that balances filler garbage with unique ideas and falls flat on its ass when it hits the performance wall.
They went for a more ambitious project, but ironically their original idea was a Hollywood blockbuster movie compared to the mobile game they've made. And really it is a mobile game, isn't it? Or a browser game. It's got micromanagement, cinematics sprinkled in...you know, it's like a pixelart piece stretched over a frame meant for an oil painting. It just doesn't sit well with itself.