Your two examples are horrible examples. Celeste is truly a pixel game. It uses pixels as an art style, but spending any time with the game reveals its complexi

Your two examples are horrible examples. Celeste is truly a pixel game. It uses pixels as an art style, but spending any time with the game reveals its complexity. - The resolution of the game is detached from the pixels, allowing them to be squished and squashed. - While it looks like they’re reusing assets, they really aren’t that much. A ton of areas have unique pixel tiles. - The code is complicated and complex; the physics and control are astoundingly advanced. - It has beautiful high resolution drawings of characters and cutscenes. - The music and sound is full fidelity. - Celeste is running on Unity, which is probably the biggest reason for its large size. That Castlevania game has a 3D main character, with Retina quality textures. Since it’s made for Apple Arcade, it has to support a 4K resolution for Apple TV, meaning all the game’s assets have to look reasonable on a screen at that resolution. The main character alone must weigh a couple megabytes.