Thanks for playing and for the feedback.
Ya the controls are a bit off they were supposed to feel a bit like fast sudden arcade controls but are also just poorly tuned. Ya I am not particularly happy with the game play loop ether bean trying to think up a way to make it more engaging and less choppy like picking up the head just haven't thought of a good solution yet.
Ya so that appears to be a glitch where you can get randomly damaged sometimes from shooting some of the final roots. I have not fully diagnosed the problem since i found it after the jam ended while testing the game a bit more. It seams to come from a slight mistake on my part wile throwing the last stage together at the very end of the jam where multiple roots are overlapped on each other creating a single frame window where the head will be at the thrown location but check for damage and get hit by the overlapped root.
So in short sorry about the bug but if you made it to that point I would say consider yourself a winner since the root in question is 3rd to last enemy spawned before you win.
Once again thanks for playing and for the feedback as well. :D