It’s pretty clear that the development of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric was troubled to say the least, and nothing shows this quite as well as seeing what the game used to look like. While we don’t know how much work was done on this version of the game, it’s pretty clear that the game was originally going to look a lot better graphically.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen this unused hub(?) world, but this is the first footage of the characters interacting with the environment. Which shows that it was playable at some point. This footage was found in the demo reel of character animator Tuan Nguyen, who was a junior animator on the project.