I think that the key to making a game like this work is to have very engaging characters. With such a dialogue heavy medium, you need to make players want to put in the effort to interact with npcs. (I would recommend character creation as a main, early focus) If you look at something like Disco Elysium, the gameplay is simple but people adore it because the dialogue is written extremely well.
As for the premise itself, I think that it seems interesting. I'll look forward to seeing how this develops.