This was a cool experience! I found the loop of excavating samples, fending off/consuming those tentacle critters, recovering from anomalies, and scanning/moving my ship around to be engaging. Navigation of the ship did feel a bit too clunky for the pace of the game. It would be nice to have some landmarks to track areas I've been in already and give another hint for navigating back to the ship when thrown away by an explosion.
I did notice I don't die, as I got down to -345 health on my first playthrough. I think the combat is reasonable enough for a death state, and it would have forced me to figure out how to cut off and eat the tails of the critters sooner.
It would have also been nice if the hook was just binded to the right mouse button as I found I always needed it in a pinch! It's also really easy to just go do things without noticing or engaging with the messages at the beginning, which made the first playthrough a bit confusing.
I did run into a game-breaking bug during my first playthrough when I cut into something explosive and it sent me flying for all eternity. I was stuck on the cutter, couldn't turn it off or change tools, and couldn't slow down either. On my next playthrough I had another experience with the explosion where when I did get to use the hook to stop myself from flying into oblivion but I got locked on the hook tool and couldn't unhook myself. The second time was a little disappointing as I had gotten considerably far in and was otherwised reaslly immersed in the experience. I'll probably give it another shot later so I can finish the story!