So the pixelart games being described mostly have (except Celeste)
640 x 360, with characters at 10% to 20% the height of that screen real estate, generally around 32px tall, up to around 64px.
HOWEVER, we're looking at higher resolution hand-painted digital backgrounds.
SO, either we can paybe reduce and the upscale? background resolution and do that late Sierra painted backgrounds-to-pixel art style (GK1, QFG 4, but also Torin's Passage and KG7 with their aggressively cartoon influenced styling).
(I am aware that there's so much prior art about this stuff, and here I am trying to work it out from first principles almost, but this is also about crunching through the problems in text to help me learn through reasoning and experimentation.)