Nice game! I really appreciate that you made a whole intro cutscene and explain some of the backstory behind the game to start out! The music was fitting and added a nice atmospheric element to the game as well.
Even though you didn’t get a chance to implement them all, the idea of capturing life forms and getting them to work for you (or not!) is intriguing, and I think there’s good potential there.
One note about the beam - it was a little tricky to avoid damage from enemies whenever there were other items (like herbs) in my beam, since only one item gets beamed up at a time. It might be nice to either allow beaming multiple items at once, or just ensuring that the nearest item is the one selected, to make it more intuitive to fight off enemies that happen to be near other stuff.