This is actually shaping up to sound like Minecraft, except a lot more heavy on the Craft than the Mine. 
Eh... while I love Minecraft, I think this game has a lot more in common with Crystalis, Zelda 2, Zelda 3, or a number of other games. The only things in common with Minecraft are the huge open worlds (though in our case it's not seamless, it's chunk-based like the games I listed above) and the fact that there is some crafting. Minecraft has this huge amount of ways you can construct in the world, and that you can alter it, in very atomic, fundamental ways. We won't have any of that.
But at the same time, Minecraft doesn't really have a story, or any particular goals, or all that much variety in locales (despite the biomes, etc, it's all basically blank and uninhabited until you arrive -- very garden of eden-ish). I don't think that means that AVWW or Minecraft are better or worse than one another, but they also aren't substitutes for one another. I very much intend to keep playing Minecraft for years, even once AVWW is done and I'm also playing that. I think the general feel of them will be vastly different in practice.
