while researching in pixel styles and old games, i realized something regarding old and new adventure games: modern adventure games using 2d environments seem to have huge trouble finding the right style. i have seen vector style games that move like 2d muppet shows and just seem unreal - unreal relative to the style itself. and then you have some really cool 2d drawn animations, which seem pretty clumsy, because it was too expensive to animate them into 60, 144 or more fps. they do not seem to reach the cartoon optic earlier games from the 90s have, and i have a faint suspicion why: there seems to be a certain threshold for when 2d graphics become "too" real and it would have been better to make it 3d or using more sophisticated techniques. we've become so accustomed to technical innovation that we stopped asking "yeah, but SHOULD we do it?". i firmly believe that 640x480 is the perfect resolution that adventure games in 2d should have. i love adventures like "Runaway" or the "Broken Sword" series, but modern reminitions almost seem desperate to convey the "old-school" look. instead, they should just use the workflow from earlier days and adapt newer techniques where looks don't matter. i see no problem in using tablets and modern photoshop tools to draw the background and animate the figures, but it should actually be done in a 640x480 and 20 - 30fps environment. even if you take modern, really good looking adventure games like "Deponia", which look amazing and awesome as a still, as soon as everything moves, you realize the limitations in the animation. but you only realize them because everything else looks so awesome. the only solution would have been to draw everything even more realisticly and make thousands of specialized animations, where at this point, developers probably would wonder if it would be easier just making everything in 3d. my take on this is, if you want to have an "old-school" game, do it in the "old-school" way. you have the advantage of modern operating systems and fast network connections - use them in the workflow, but restrict your art: scanned artwork, 256 colors, low resolution, limited framerate. give yourself the experience you want your players feel - then you'll probably see that the game will connect you with the player through your game.