Hi, I am currently having trouble with deciding about the art style of an game I am going to develop and thus looking for references, thoughts and inspirations for it.

The game will be an topdown 2D RPG playing in an virtual reality (e.g. simulated/digital world). This digital world is mostly natural (large grasslands, forests, caves, vulcanos etc.).

Thoughts:

• Should be relativly mature (or atleast not "aw cuuute"), though not depressive.
• Shouldn't be as static as pixel art usually tends to be. (I planned to make this by doubling the resolution of the graphics and applying an zoom level which changes dynamicly, I am inspired by Aquaria for doing that, its a totally different kind of game, but I still think that that would do the trick)
• Lights tend to add a lot atmosphere to a game. I am planning to add shaders to calculate lights from lightmaps and normalmaps as well as for light dynamics. (Bright things in the darkness "glow" and stuff)
• Pixel or Raster art? 3D and vector most likely not because of effort and because they tend to be "soulless" on game-friendly resolutions. Pixel can become tedious to create on bigger resolutions, raster art is harder to control in general.

If anyone has something which could be helpfull, please tell. =)