Interesting concept. I wanted to play this some before commenting on the art, as the in-game experience can always be different.
My initial impressions are that the art direction isn't the worst it could be, but I think the mashup of realism and cell shading end up negating the desirable qualities of both. Cell-shading helps define form using color and shape, while realistic detail conveys the differences in texture and materials. It feels indecisive however, having something things with very little texture detail that look really great cell shaded, but also having things like shirts, wood, brick, etc. with way too much detail.
This is in the early stages, but having all those minute details cell shaded turns them into a muddy mess that creates a high amount of visual clutter and distraction. In some scenes it's not so bad, but in others, it's very hard to understand what the visual hierarchy is on a scene-to-scene basis. I noticed a lot of sequences have the black borders on the top to focus the scene; that may or may not be intentional because you noticed it as well, but they do hide some of the noise.
Here's an example that works pretty well and gives us a good view of the scene:
The amount of heavily detailed texture is low and the colors are distinct enough to give a sense of depth and scale even without shadows. Overall, easy to look at and know what I'm looking.
Here's an example that is just hard to take in:
There's so much detail on everything that it's melding together in a soup. You can barely make out the shelves in the back or tell if the circular objects are the wood, or kitchen pans. There's no where for the eye to rest, and I would define looking at it as "scratchy."
Overall, I'm not saying to scrap the notion of having some realistic textures, but I definitely think toning back some of the detail is something to think about. That can give your game a more solid visual language. If you want to go the way of more detail, lighting/shadows would greatly improve some scenes. Again, this is super early obviously, so you may have plans in the future to lean into one way or the other.