I see there's some improvements across the board like with climbing onto crates instead of bonking into the water or clearly starting out with a small dungeon. I think the title screen is new and a neat thing, too. I was skeptical about the skeleton hands before but the little gestures and the novelty of it makes it worth it.
I'm not going to go too deep since I already played quite a bit last time but aside from updating the UI like you said, I think the most important thing is to have new players with less to see. Put lock symbols and grey out unimportant tabs, have the tab to buy the first 'guest' maybe flash if the player hasn't bought any yet, unlock the tier room once the player has enough to actually progress up a tier and have the first tier only cost the resources from one full success, that sorta stuff.
But I think you already had a comment conversation about all that. Anyway, good luck as always.