Yep, that seems to be the consensus! I've been working on addressing this feedback since I plan on continuing this project outside of the completion of the jam. I oversaturated the tileset and the cat sprite so they pop more against the background in chapter one, and used a shader to add a bright purple outline to the black cat skin so nine is more visible when he looks like that. I've also fine tuned the player controller a lot, although I'm still not 100% satisfied with it.
Thanks for playing!!