Don't apologize for putting gameplay in your game. Hate the trend on this website of everything being transitioned into an VN. Sandbox is good for me.
It's often a guilt by association thing. So many sandboxes, in part because of the episodic nature of games on the site and also in part because of the novice nature of a lot of devs who have just broken sandboxes, are empty, grid fests, or hard to navigate and so it has turned a lot of people off to sandboxes in general. I usually wait a few updates before playing most new games unless I know the dev or something, so I can't speak to how this game does its sandbox. There are a few games that have okay sandboxes, but those are the exception and bad sandboxes have left a bad taste for the feature in many player's minds.