By no means i mean disrespect with this post. I've come here as an Independant Artist as Niflas himself, to share some ideas...

i'm not a big fan of photo backgrounds, mostly because they always look rushed and since the lighting never matches between pictures. And you always have the problem of needing to be an extremely photorealistic painter if you want to change something other than colors.

So, I made these 5 minutes mockups in Painter, to show how easily you can turn an photograph into an abstract painting. Since you already had the work to crop the photos from their backgrounds, you can add the effect to every and each object separately. Using maybe different materials for each layer of objects. Maybe making the background with big strokes and showing lots of canvas, and as you move to the foreground smalles brushstrokes with more precision.

And as you can see by the pictures, this is a very unique visual that others game don't have... Braid has a painted look, but its not abstract as this. Limbo has black foreground, but its not smooth as this.

Painter doesn't just "Turn your photo into a painting" like photoshop does, it actually paints the picture following the curves and colors. as if it was brush stroking every part of it... And you can paint on top of it anytime. Either using colors you choose or simply the colors from the photo (no need to eye-drop it, it detects the color by position).

Using simple things like animated masks you can easily make effects like Waterfalls (the water falling as it if was being brushed by someone)... Lakes and a Sea of fresh ink (shining as its still wet). Grass moving as if someone was painting it on the spot... and various effects.

Sure. I know the answer to this probably will be:
"the game has its style, its my style and its too late to change it"... But, I thought I would drop this little food for ideas.

I'm a big fan of within and knytt, and I decided that it would be fair to share this idea with you.
I think this can easily improve the graphical quality of your titles and speed up your development pipeline, while allowing you to express yourself and create moods (a thing we all know you're a master of). I was disapointed with Night Sky because of the gradient backgrounds.
And i'm prettu sure this style of painted backgrounds can easily improve the reaction to your titles as far as graphics go. If with 5 minutes I can do something decent with a small PNG. Imagine someone being able to work with layers and having more time?

The possibilities are endless.