Experiments in blending art styles

I've been playing around with a concept for blending pixel-art style with higher-resolution graphics techniques, for potential video game ideas. So far I'm just doing some simple prototyping to find out if the concept will even work, but this is a fun little teaser glimpse of the experiment I'm doing.

If it pans out, I'm hoping to write up a more detailed description of the idea with more demo images in the future - spoons permitting, as always.