Sounds neat! I bet a fast & breezy complexity limit for combat will help; kind of an old-school Ultima feel.
Along similar themes, (self-aggrandizement warning), one of my first games I’d stand behind is a dungeon inversion: play as boss monster, feed on other monsters while being mindful of the ecology, defend yourself from the hero that comes in to slay everyone, satirizing the RPG’s destructive influence on functioning ecosystems. Most heavily-drawn from: Cubivore/Dōbutsu Banchō