https://www.superrune.com/tutorials/loom_ega.php might be of interest.

Might be biased because I grew up with the Amiga version, but the game looks so much better and has the right atmosphere in the lower color palette.

I'm split, I've not played the game so I only have the images provided to go off of, but for many of the photos, the old version looks massively better, much more artistic and evocative, but then for some of the images, like the crystals in Crystalgard, the new ones look so much better.

If I had to pick, I would probably choose the older version, but for the outdoor areas, and dungeons, and character portraits the new ones are visually miles ahead.

Fascinating comparisons, thanks for sharing it.

The medium is so constrained the artists had little choice but to try to squeeze the most out of it for expressive ends and it dictated some of the stylistic choices. I think this sort of upscaling tends to throw that out and it's most eyepokey in static images like these. Some of the upscalers work pretty well (depending on taste) in motion, most emulators include a bunch of different ones.

Maybe it’s because the line width appears thinner than in the originals and appears to have been used to contribute to the shading of the image.

I think this may be the key point, at least for what was befuddling me. Looking at the right side of the castle, the old image has a clear sense of depth while the upscaled version doesn’t