That box stacking thing does look cool. I can imagine something like this combined with, like, and Overcooked kind of experience where teams are chaotically trying to communicate about box stacking.
When it comes to mechanics I think should be ripped off–this is a common take, but I am surprised the nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor has not been ripped off successfully, even years after that game came out. I expected to see games wholesale steal the entire system, because although it’s a lot of work to implement something like that, Shadow of Mordor proved that it can substantially deepen other content in the game by giving the player more to think about and more to do while they’re messing around in an open world or in regular enemy combat. However, very few games have done that. I’ve heard that Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey did a minor version of it with their mercenaries system, but it wasn’t anywhere near as good, apparently.
I’m also surprised that more survival/crafting games haven’t ripped off The Flame and the Flood, which is IMO the only game in that genre which was able to successfully refocus the gameplay on travel rather than base-building. All these games are super focused on base-building–making voxel houses, building voxel walls, crafting dried meat and putting it in a chest, etc–which makes a lot of them feel pretty samey. TFATF kept crafting but eliminated the base-building and forced the player to keep moving constantly. I feel like the survival-constructionn-crafting genre is kind of on a downswing after a decade of releases, but survival-travel gameplay space is still not that well explored. I kind of want to make a game in this space myself, someday!