Like Ron Gilbert wrote in one of his previous blog posts, Monkey Island 1 and 2 were (what is today called) pixel art because pixel art was "state of the art" at that time. He already (co-)created a retro pixel art game with Thimbleweed Park, no need to do it again...

For Return in particular it does make sense to compare it to 1 and 2, since Return seems to be picking the series up where Gilbert left it and ignoring what others did since then.

(For what it's worth, I remember Curse causing some controversy when it came out, because of that shift to the toon style from the original pixel aesthetic.)

All indications are that while the game picks up threads from MI2 and starts at the end of MI2, the bulk of the game may happen after Curse and even Tales. Ron has said multiple times that "it's all canon" and about the only things that he's acknowledged are kind of ret-conned around are some things that occurred in Escape, which even Tales partly ignored.

We don't have much details yet on how exactly it fits into the canon as the game isn't out yet, but Ron has kept pointing out that Return isn't "MI3a" like he originally grumped an idea about, but a post-Tales Monkey Island game in just about all senses.

Given Murray's involvement in the trailers to date, I think comparing the art style to Curse is more accurate, personally, and I think there's a loving conversation there. I like what I've seen of the art style so far. (But also I like Double Fine's "house style" and this clearly has DNA ties to that, too.)

I was talking about "Secret" and "LeChuck's Revenge". When "Curse" came out I was "too cool" for computer games. Now I'm back at being "lame" :)

Entirely off-topic, but this resonates so much for me - I think I went entirely off computer games for about three years, peaking around the age of 18. I left the world of the Amiga and then later got a PC for Uni and slipped into an entirely different gaming world, running at 5x the clockspeed. On school holidays I'd come back to an ever-failing disk collection, to the point I only had a shareware game called Galaxy Wars (I think?) and an install of SimAnt (on a 20Mb HD, lol), by which point it was clear that the Amiga was truly dead in the water!

If there's one thing I'm looking forward to with this new MI, it's the updated theme tune, which sounds glorious. It WILL be my ringtone again!

They were quite pretty but Ron Gilbert wasn't involved in MI3 and 4. That's why this is a bit like a branch off MI2