I would go so far as to say if you get rid of the graphics completely and have text descriptions (think Dwarf Fortress which has many things that are not represented in its graphics at all, just in the textual descriptions) you fully free the imagination of the player.
Some things are just not representable graphically at all, my go to example is “the most beautiful woman he had ever seen”, easy to write in text, impossible to portray on screen in a way that every viewer will feel the same.
On the flipside, you give real intelligence 32 pixels and it infers photorealistic images:
(The textures are 32x32 pixels. Yes, that’s technically 1024 pixels, but shhh. 🙃)
I would go so far as to say if you get rid of the graphics completely and have text descriptions (think Dwarf Fortress which has many things that are not represented in its graphics at all, just in the textual descriptions) you fully free the imagination of the player.
Some things are just not representable graphically at all, my go to example is “the most beautiful woman he had ever seen”, easy to write in text, impossible to portray on screen in a way that every viewer will feel the same.