I asked myself same question. I play games on my television, so anything low-res often is either hard to read (subtitles, description, etc.) or hurts my eyes. Well, in the case of Wadjet, I eventually picked their games up, moved my sofa closer and chose the biggest window mode possible, lol.

However I understand it's cheaper to make.

It's not a cost issue -- at least not in dollars and cents. Wormwood's core team was three people: Victor Pflug (the artist and project founder), me (the writer/designer), and James Spanos (the coder). To go to a higher resolution on the sprites would have required bringing in another artist. That would have fundamentally changed the character of the game, just as bringing another writer in would have. As it was, every pixel represented Vic's artistic judgment. You wouldn't have had the same kind of unified vision if we'd added another artist: there would have been no way for Vic to convey all his themes and approaches to a subordinate artist, and obviously if he had another "equal" artist on the project, we'd be dealing with two divergent visions.

Also, Vic's decision to do low-resolution graphics was an artistic one itself. From the get-go he wanted to do a low-resolution game. I realize some people might think his work looks better at higher resolution, but it wasn't (initially) an economizing decision, but an aesthetic one.

Thank you for the extensive answer. It's always nice to know a real reasoning behind the idea :).

I believe OP questioned an absence of hi-res, not art style. :) I like it too but I guess it'd be more comfortable to play it on smaller screen.

Can't you just play it full screen? If anything, low resolution forces the text to be bigger. A high res game can have tiny fonts, but a low resolution limits how small the text can be. When you scale that up to the size of a TV I would have thought they would be bigger than the fonts in most high res games.

Ah, in that case I might have misread. But unless some of you are somehow playing this at postage-sized dimensions (i.e. 1:1 pixel mapped to your TV/monitor resolution), which I imagine could be very annoying, the low res *is* part of the art style.

To make sure: in my case the game's 640x480 is stretched to full screen, to fill the full size of my 1600x1200 monitor- with intentionally blocky/'blurry' effect (which Ipersonally love).