I love these types of games, and I've tried to get into it multiple times... But everything feels like it's on such a strict timer. I just want to chill and farm/explore/talk to people without worrying if I spent too much time enjoying myself doing any one particular thing. If it had some kind of sandbox mode or if you could slow down the time, I'd give it another go.

I get like this in any sort of "real time passes" games, with some exceptions. If you have a limited amount of time to do a limited amount of things in game, my mind starts min/maxing what I should be doing every moment in game. In Outer Wilds the passage of time matters less cause you always start back at zero, what you gain each run is just knowledge, you don't lose out and fall behind on any resources, points or whatever cause you didn't do certain things that day.

The game is like that for the first game month. When you get to summer you tend to relax a bit more so after your tool upgrades.

I 100% agree. There's just so much to do and too much of your day is spent as a time tax maintaining what you already have. There are several unlocks to reduce this, but they come far too late in a playthrough in my opinion.

I find a time control/clock-stopping on demand mod almost mandatory for me to be able to play without stressing, especially when playing with expansion mods that more than double the amount of content in the game.