Ho boy, I think that's almost the fastest death I've had in this jam. I mean maybe it was the intention, but the difficulty is just too harsh.
Each action draining sanity is really limiting to the player, and it basically becomes trial and error to find a path through the level which quite frankly stops being fun pretty quick. There was another entry that had a timer for losing sanity and dying, until you find an item, and I think even that was a bit hard but preferable to whats used here. The movement and turning is instant, but the corridors are dimly lit, the walls mostly look the same, and theres no compass or map to tell you which direction you're facing. And since there's no strafing movement in the game, the player dies even faster because they have to turn and then move.
The furthest I got was finding two of the runes, picking up 3 sanity potions and encountering one cat. But that was after 3 tries and quite frankly I had given up after that.
A bug I noticed after dying is being unable to move after respawning, which meant I had to fully exit and restart the game. Something I also noticed is the cursor is displayed underneath a lot of the UI elements (maybe all?).
There was clearly a lot of care put into the game, and reading the description it was kinda nice seeing the teams cats being credited! There was some neat little environmental details, and finding the secret sanity potions was a nice surprise. I certainly wish I had been able to implement secrets in my entry lol.
But all the detail and mystery is lost in the frantic rush to navigate the level, so I barely saw much of the game itself.
It seems like there's some solid stuff here, and I'd love to see more of the level but the sanity loss combined with the controls, lack of map and compass make a very potent mix of issues.
I think you should definitely still be proud you submitted though, and from another comment I saw there is at least a win state so good job on that!