The root cavern in the current build is kinda wack. Seems the spawnrates are jacked way up - presumably was for testing purposes, and forgot to lower it? If you want to do anything there, you just go in, grab the closest thing, then press escape and click to reset the area (you keep your items), and hope that next time the enemies spawn just a tiny bit further away.
Also, the new big enemies seem to always know exactly where the player is and will head directly for them; sometimes leading to situations where they are blocking the entrance before you even go in. If you do go balls to the wall and zoom in with stamina and speed pots, you'll see just how crazy high the enemy spawn rate is. I almost took a picture of the time when I had 6 enemies chasing me within 15 seconds of loading the level.
All in all though: Definitely an improvement over the older versions. It's way easier to see, the new hub and merchants are interesting, and potions are a fun mechanic. Dying or hiding in the dark without a torch now punishes you via lowering your sanity. Lower sanity means everything gets darker, the colors get distorted, you start seeing illusions, your stamina is lower, and if it reaches zero you die (as in, your save is nuked). The stamina system is also a good addition imo, as you can no longer simply infinitely run around to avoid anything ever catching up to you.
Potions do have a few bugs though. 1: Invisibility potions don't do anything at all. 2: once you make a potion, its position in your inventory is saved and the empty slot is locked. Once you respawn, you regain all potions that you drank. The only ways to permanently lose your potions are to have them stolen by the thieves in root cavern, dropping them, selling them, or dying in the glowshroom cavern (this last one can actually be undone by going to the guy in the corner of the hub area while you're naked and turning your back to him. this will give a scene and respawn you with everything you had prior to dying in the glowshroom area).
*edit:* Oh and I can't find any use for TNT. I find areas that look like obvious "throw tnt here to open a way" complete with enemies being behind the wall, but the TNT doesn't actually do anything. Throwing it at enemies also doesn't do anything to them, from what I've been able to see.