I'm deeply sorry about this.I have to admit that I am confused as to why auto-saving didn't worked for you and I'll try look to find solutions to prevent this issue to happen again.Thank you for taking time playing the game and the bug report.
Edit:I'm sorry to bother you, but do you have more informations about what you did exactly and if you're using a windows environment?
I'm trying to replicate the bug to understand it.I also find it very weird the game didn't saved at all,as you should have unlocked some check point to reach the slime part,such as the bell falling down that trigger an auto-save.
i'm using windows 10 pro. all i did was just play the game, died a bit because of the red skull miniboss, then fell with the bell to the 1st room. after all that i went to the lava room, walked around, killed slimes and used the catapult. big slime got mad and started doing wave attacks that i still have 0 idea how to dodge, but instead of knockback they were sucking me in, closer to the big slime. after i died my caracter kept getting reverse knockbacks and got sucked into the lava where he forgot how to die...
then because i couldn't open any menu or do anything, being locked from any actions, i closed and reopened the game, after which i had no save and got quite mad :c
Sorry about the late answer.Basically,the shockwave will make your character move backward,so if you happen to look at the opposite direct of the slime,it will looks like you are pulled in.I have been having issue figuring a way to make it so it push you away from the slime.I also agree that the knocked animation is very long and can be frustrating, I want to tweak it but I have some issues with unity that sometimes break my animations with the MC(which mean I probably need to redo him in the future).