I expected, going into this, to hate it because this isn't really my genre, the Terraria-likes, or whatever you want to call them. Buuuut, this game is very awesome. Great job. I love the atmosphere, the music is cool and the way it fades the deeper you go. Sick effect. That's a classic effect for a reason. Solid story, just enough to keep it interesting and motivate the player without it bogging anything down.
I wish the hotkey setup was a little better. I think you did a good job giving the player enough food and water without that aspect of the game feeling frustrating (Thank you for the urine bottles, lol. That was a colorful bit of flavor as well!) However, in the mid-late game my hotbar setup was knife, throwing spears, explosive spears, fish meat. So every time I had to drink water I had to set water to my hotbar, unpause, drink the water, re-pause, and then click meat, explosive spear, spear, knife in that order. Oof. I think a click-n-drag setup could work, but, especially with consumables, it would be cool if you could just eat them FROM the menu. Like, left click is add to hotbar, right click is consume. Just a thought.
Small thing, but maybe you could call out negatives stat effects in the inventory differently? Like, maybe the human meat can have red text for "-5 Thirst" instead of the normal white text? I was chomping this stuff down for a bit without realizing i was making it harder for myself. Especially early game where water is a little scarcer.
I would love tooltips in the crafting menu. Even if it's just tooltips for items you can currently craft (to preserve the mystery or whatever). I'm a big wimp so I was scared to waste resources seeing what stuff did.
Lastly, this might just be me but I kept trying to press Esc to exit the item menus which paused the game and did not, in fact, exit the menus.
Great job overall! Impressive for a jam game, for sure.