Game is really fun. It's very hard to not want to do another run once you start.
While it's true there isn't a ton of content - it's a cheap game, and it's a lot of fun.
No regerts. Keep crabbin'.

Lacks the satisfaction of gradual progression necessary in roguelikes. You will get your fill fairly early on and there is not enough to incentivize more playthroughs.

Okay, so after 43 hours and having gotten 80% of the game's checklist done, and having beaten Pressure 20, I finally feel qualified to make a review. I think this game's been so successful because of how intuitive the concept of evolution is even to people unfamiliar with the "roguelite" genre. Kill/find, eat, evolve. That's it. And while that makes the game accessible, it also makes it feel like the depth leaves a lot to be desired. Most importantly, you don't have to be a brickhouse and clobber everything. You can be small and dodge everything and run out the clock on bosses, or the cataclysm to kill Krabken, the final boss. You can also be very social and essentially play a summoner and have charmed enemies fight for you. So that's a great foundation to build off of.

I think the main issue is that unless you're playing the highest pressure runs, it's pretty easy to level up quickly, which means there's not that much specialization save for a few evolutions that will close you off from other abilities, so what happens is that many of my winning run builds blurred together as a mostly crab-like creature with wings, arms, and legs. The game has biomes, but by the second half of a run they all feel the same because they won't affect your movement as much and there's hardly any enemies unique to each biome. There's also only one evolution that benefits the player for thriving in a specific biome, which is Scales to Basking. There's no real purpose to hang around in snowy biomes. The water biome is almost completely pointless and only serves to protect lower level builds in higher pressures that can protect you from aggressive land enemies (like the cats).

There's not a lot of variety to the combat as far as how enemies attack, most of the danger comes from aggressive enemies always being just as fast or faster than you, and it's tough to get enough speed to get your run going at times, so a lack of speed is an almost guaranteed death sentence in higher pressure runs after the first boss, which is when the cats show up. The variety in attack options is also lacking, there's no real projectile builds worth having because one has limited range (Spit), and the other (Stoner) involves standing still in a game where it's very dangerous to stand still in the second half of the run for any length of time.

I don't quite know how closely this game wants to hem to realism because on the one hand they give out an animal fact for each evolution option, but on the other hand it's about playing a blue slime in a world where everything's turning into a crab. The physical and ability attacks have different hitboxes, but they're trivial when all combat is up close and personal. And to have an update with more diverse projectile builds would require a massive retooling of the game and require new enemies that use projectiles as well, because there's hardly any enemies that shoot projectiles. You wouldn't want the game to become too easy if nothing's balanced around countering that.

The genetics system definitely comes in handy, but it still doesn't feel like quite enough to make each run feel unique. There's Spawn and Envoy of Chaos, two genetics that alter your starting stats and affinity, respectively, but those still don't really challenge the player. Maybe if the player could have more choice in what stats they have to start, such as skill points and a given budget, that could help to spice things up. This could also help with the higher pressures, it could be a fun tradeoff for the stacked debuffs. The silver lining could be that the higher the pressure, the more skill points you have to play with in making your starting stats.

As for biomes, I feel like what could be done to make them more important to the game is that the player could choose the default, which is all biomes, OR choose one biome (all water, all desert, all snow, all grass, etc). More evolutions that add passive boosts to remaining in certain biomes (Fur adds an additional 10% to damage resistance so long as the player's in the snow biome, for instance). On the same coin, debuffs pop up for certain evolutions upon the player entering a zone. So for Fur, it could be -10% damage resistance upon entering the desert biome.

I still enjoyed playing the game for what it was and I feel like with how successful it's been, the potential is enormous. It's a game about evolution, there's a million directions to take that as far as major updates go, and the team already announced a short-term roadmap. Given how many players there are, I'm sure people are already clamoring for co-op, which would make sense if players dedicated themselves to different affinities to compensate for each other's shortcomings. Recommended.