i think youve got a really good game going here, its a great idea and i like the core gameplay, but theres some issues id like to point out:
why are the mutation points for going past your highest zone locked to 5? this is super punishing to long runs for no real reason, and also means you can permanently lock yourself out of mutation points by pushing past your highest zone while youre already capped. at a certain point its faster to do the first checkpoint and reset, since itd take far longer to reach a new highest zone for mutation points that get capped very quickly.
it feels like arbitrarily locking the amount to force the player to engage with prestiges, instead of naturally being encouraged to prestige because progression has gotten too slow.
i think you might wanna just generally abandon the mutation points from new highest zone reached mechanic, and just make it based off your highest zone reached this outbreak. your first couple outbreaks get you a ton of mutation points, then you get them slower and slower as it takes longer and longer to reach higher zones.
it generally just feels like a bad mechanic to engage with
im not a fan of how humans can just run away from you forever at low hp. it feels pretty bad i can almost kill someone, then just not be able to finish them off as they run off forever. i think itd be nice if they ran away for a bit, then eventually grouped up with another human (maybe they heal a bit when they do this too?) so you could kill them eventually, albeit a bit harder now since you have to kill two at once.
this issue might just be because i havent invested enough in movement speed