It's certainly rough around edges. So the keycard doesn't close you to the rest of the game, keycard doors turn on a green indicator and you can just walk through them. Slime/Goo wolf's puddles are meant to cause trouble, but you later unlock an item called anti-goo spray which removes them, it's in the locker with the padlock to the left of the main junction. In the future I plan to increase charges on it from 4 to 6. Oh and you can reverse from being a pooltoy, you just have to deflate to a level below default first. The idea here was that needless are sharp.
There are more things that people find unobvious, but over time I hope to make as many of these systems intuitive as I can eventually. Right now I am focused on a major update, but it will also come with some missing content and reworks and bug fixes too. Thanks for the feedback!
Viewing post in AfterShift: the Post-TF game comments
Well, my problem with getting the lvl1 key is not that it doesn't unlock parts of the game, it is that the way back to earlier areas is blocked when you get the key.
So I guess that if you want to get back you need to be a pooltoy otherwise when you're teleported into the belt you'd be caught and transformed into a pig. And if you're a goo dog, you can't use the interface to get teleported back.
The original route is blocked by sparks, but there are two alternative ways back. After going down through the blue door, you either head left to fight a robot, or down and left through the pooltoy rooms.
After the first lever door, you’ll have a gun and enough ammo to kill the robot, with extra ammo scattered around the map. Alternatively, you become a pooltoy in the four terminal room and use a medkit to revert afterwards.
Both routes lead back to the blue door next to the first pooltoy room, and from there to the original area.