I picked this up last night. Bright, colorful, good art design, whimsical sound design... and a pretty decent UI. Farming, carpentry, blacksmithing, masonry, weaving, trapping, sheep-herding, cooking, and soldiering are all professions now and the little guys keep well enough on task in the latest 'early release alpha' build. Hearthling profiles are neatly handled with a big colorful "d6" looking graphic that displays their three rolls on the 1d6 stats; body, mind and spirit. This makes it so easy to assign very creative, tough or brave people to various jobs. I love the custom house construction. There is huge potential here. I managed to create a classic American red-roof barn with a hayloft full of straw beds after some trial and error, and it was great to just save the blueprint and reuse it in later towns.
Alpha-gripes; building construction does remain buggy and prone to crashing and I have trouble getting a two room house to construct correctly. There's also a lack of feedback from jobs if they can't be performed for lack of materials; a little 'Urist cancels construction, no wood' spam would be a welcome addition. Also I can't quite nail down what core gameplay is. Is this a survival town defense game? There's a shortage of noteworthy threats if that is the case. Most goblins panic and run when facing the peasant rabble, which makes them so cute you just want to enslave them into the coal mines rather than kill them.
It does, however, enjoy a gorgeous Legend of Zelda feel and bugs aside, the production quality is very good. I have a feeling this team will go "all the way" as Kerbal did.