It released! Someone gifted it to me, so I'm able to give it a go. First impressions are both wonderful and terrible.
The wonderful: the game itself feels amazing and immersive. I found the tutorial pretty decent - although they favored immersion over clarity, which I think was a bad decision, it paid off in the end... after a lot of poking around trying to figure out which button it wanted me to push.
It wasn't until I found the ingame help that I really got anywhere. The star cluster is quite expansive and it's clear you can do some awesome things with ships later on.
The terrible: It's buggy, crashes occasionally, and you can't choose when you save (or make multiple saves). Again, probably done for immersion. In this case it's a fatal flaw because the game isn't stable. In my current save there appears to be a bug that makes it impossible for me to make any money from completing contracts. This is a Very Bad Thing, because that's how you make money in the game. I hesitate to use the term "unplayable", but I can't progress anywhere in the game with this bug acting the way it is. Quitting and restarting doesn't seem to make a difference; it seems to be tied to the save somehow. (Or possibly my computer.) Near the start, you earn
almost as much money from each contract as it takes to pay docking fees, meaning you make slightly more than it takes to break even. With contracts broken, this saps your funds very, very quickly, and eventually you reach a point where you're not allowed to leave a station at all, and the game "ends". (Unofficially. You simply don't have the funds to take back off.)
It doesn't feel like a full release to me, but rather an alpha with great promise. I want to like it, but the bugs make it difficult.