Thanks for your detailed feedback. Let me answer to some of your points. A lot of it does actually come down to the time constraint.
You didn't see any other monsters because it's a lot of work to create an attack behavior that is responsive to the player and uses different attack animations according to distance. I actually have a humanoid enemy that I worked on during the jam time, and I took him out during the last half hour, because the way he was set up, fighting him was not fun and he bugged out on death and I didn't have enough time to work on him. Speaking of death animations, the crab monsters have them, but the problem is when the player keeps hitting the crab after the death animation triggers it gets interrupted and then just freezes eventually. I already fixed that for the post-jam update.
The direction of attacks is indeed dependent on the directional and not by view. It's a free moving camera, else you can't get panoramic viewpoints from the side hehe
The player only jumps back after being hit too many times, mostly to bring distance between you and the enemies, so you can attack from a different angle again.If you only wandered around and fought the crab monsters, you missed the quest line of activating the obelisks. But it's ok, the theme was lost & found, and you explored the lost aspect of it :)
In the postjam update I plan to make an intro that sets up the story and controls a bit better. Also there might be more types of creatures and some other things to do, like driving around on a hover bike.