I still haven’t seen a credit list anywhere, but yeah, sometimes developers associated with the publisher who did little to no actual work on the game also get full credit. (I’ve personally seen this happen on games I’ve worked on - the studio where I was working did all the development work, but the credits also included the names of every person in the publisher’s in-house dev team, as some of them had been providing feedback.)
In this case, it does look like a game that two people could have made, and there’s absolutely no way 19 people worked on that game in any significant capacity, unless they cranked out the game in a couple months. Looking at Outer Edge Interactive’s website, it very much appears that Cyan provided the design (and art direction) and Outer Edge did most of the actual work (and probably bought some assets). If Cyan had actually been making the game with a 17 person team, they would have had absolutely no reason to outsource any work to a two person team at Outer Edge, much less to have them do “a large amount of the World Art.”
So no, the credits aren’t just there “for show” - Cyan came up with the original game, they came up with the design, they probably modernized the visual direction even, but they clearly weren’t full-time developers on this project.
