I really like the style you're going for here. the music and visuals are all nicely made. I especially like some of the enemy sprites/ player character designs, and the 9 lives gimmick is a clever use of the character design being a cat and trading their lives around.

To be honest I could not stand the combat, it gives almost no feedback to what the enemy is doing and feels like I might as well just roll 4 dice and see if me or the enemy instantly dies. I also somehow one shot both enemies in the last area while on my last life just by using guard and then 4 breaks. 

It feels like the combat could have worked better if there was some indication of what the enemy was going to do, maybe if you could see the first few moves they would pull out, or if it started off with less actions than instantly throwing 3-4 of them at you, meaning with bad rolls you can lose the first battle in 2 turns without knowing what's going on at all.

As others have pointed out too yea, the text moves by far too quickly and while gameplay is still happening so I pretty much gave up reading it after the first corridor. I usually dont have too much trouble reading quickly but the font used tripped me up enough times to just not bother trying.

Also just a small note on the models: You should use a custom material rather than unity's default material settings, as it makes everything have a bright plastic-y glow by default. You'll want to set the material roughness to much higher than the default to get rid of that.

"The End?"

I had plenty of fun playing this. First I really like your implementation of the horror+solitude themes. I enjoyed the weird "It was only a dream. Now bear's talking" ending, it's very appropriate. I think the game felt surreal at least in some parts, which given the ending was intended. I like the dialogs, for example the cat being a cat when talking about the rats, I'll deal about them if I feel like it. One thing I really liked was that the dialogs did not interrupt exploration. The 3D part is functional, there are several environments and the view is good but I love the 2D parts of the art, the portraits look great and so do all the enemies, I took some notes that I liked The Rat King and the Moon dog? but all of these really. I also really like the music as you reach the basement. I like the push-your-luck aspect of the combat, as you don't want to use your lifes too early, and in the same time the more into the game the less you want to die with remaining lifes left. I restarted twice. I think I won the game with one remaining life and was very lucky with the two last encounters so from my experience the difficulty was appropriate, which is something I highly value.

I can see the game benefit from just a few extra consumables. Tecnically I'd say movement is a bit slow but with the tight levels it was not much of a problem here.

That's a very cool and original entry, thanks for sharing.

Love the banter between the characters and exploring the house. I don't get how the battle system works though; I was just selecting things at random, then I'd lose hearts and have no idea why.

Great atmosphere and music, the art style and characters are great too ! 
However I must admit i'm not a big fan of the fighting system, maybe I don't understand it well but it seemed too random for my taste. 
Like someone else mentioned I also don't understand quite well what dictate the number of actions you can do in a fight, sometime it's three, sometimes four. 
But the game benefit greatly from the cast and the ambiance, I love the idea of being a child exploring his house basement with his cat and teddy bear, it's so cute. Love the idea.

Love the atmospheric music / sounds in this game!

Also, fantastic pixel art, the cats face is amazing! <3 Great concept to have 9 lives which are borrowed from the cat.

The intro text is quite slow. It would be nice if there was a “next” option to speed it up. But, the font is a good choice and the color changing based on who is narrating works well.

The movement felt a bit slow and I found myself needing to wait for the camera to move if I wanted to navigate somewhere quickly. Otherwise, the controls were solid.

The free looking camera felt quite good!

Although combat was easy enough for me to get through, I didn’t quite understand what I was doing. Sometimes I have 3, 4, or 5 choices and I don’t know why. I would have loved some kind of visual feedback to indicate if I should be blocking / breaking. It seemed that no matter what I did, I would always lose at least one heart during a round in combat.

Why is this basement so big and terrifying! ;) At first, I thought the characters were over reacting about the rats because there were far worse enemies in the basement… but then I found the Rat King… horrifying pixel art! Okay… just reached “The Yellow King?” (O o O) – Nice work.

One bug I found: If you engage an enemy but are not facing them, you cannot move the camera to face them.

Also, it would be great to have a “Try Again” button after you die.

I really enjoyed this one!