Same here.

When starting out without having seen all that much of the game beforehand, I saw a great potential for just that expectation you and I shared. The game keeps you jumping from one task to another, managing your initially growing base(s) to produce new necessities, catch new/more pals, explore the map and ...well, that's basically it, so far.

The gameplay loop so far is pretty barebones and the countless bugs, especially regarding basebuilding and -managing, grew all the more frustrating as I was forced to realize that there simply is no goal or endgame besides catching all the pals, exploring the whole empty map and maybe spend countless hours optimizing it all by breeding the best attributes in your pals, i.e. holding F and waiting.

A lot of that is hopefully simply a symptom of it being early-access though, I expect to have a better time in a few months when the hype died down and the game has matured a bit more.