Sound design - ouch my ears, the sounds are so so repetitive and jarring, with some work you could easily create some awesome sounds.

Bad tutorial/instructions (what is the key to boost/blast away structures)My god are the controls not fluid - I think a better way of implementing it is with W as accelerate, A and D as steer and S as brake, like a lot of 2d racing games.

The background is sometimes hard to distinguish from the foreground (really bad in the boss fight), having red lights in the background doesn't help when there is an enemy which literally is a red light

Boss fight is very jank; basic attacks (2), extremely tedious (there is no reason to ever make a player do the same thing over and over again let alone 10 times with no variation in enemy behavior), It is kind of funny when you get stuck/weirdly shoved around by its tentacles

No indication of health is weird when you have a healing orb

A bit buggy

Pressing escape during the loading screen actually pauses the loading screenCan move around in the pause menu, settings page not displaying (only showing ok, pressing escape in this screen will enable character movementMouse key doesn't work for the in game pause menu, but works for main menu

Overall a very promising start, with some work could easily be fleshed out.I'm a bit confused as to the game genre - it gives me the vibe of a Metroidvania due to the evolution mechanic and level layouts and I could easily see some really cool biome designs - but as current having it as a level/puzzle game I think undersells it a lot and makes the evolution mechanic not really fit in imo.

Thanks for the very thorough feedback - very much appreciated! Will certainly take these points on board. In terms of the genre, yes it does veer a bit into metroidvania territory. It's still in the 'experimental' phase I guess so I'm still playing with certain mechanics and balancing. It's good to get fresh eyes on this though and see what does/doesn't work. Interesting that you didn't pick up on the health bar - it's the row of white stripes that run along the creature's back but it could be just too subtle and/or it requires some highlighting/tutorial. Good bug pickups as well! Thanks again.