Thank you Eishiya, highly valuable comments as always!

I plan to make a WIP thread soon when I get everything together, and work on a few more things. That was the main reason for the mockup though, to find if the direction is going well. I'll post any future updates along with sprites and such to a WIP thread.

The big blocks feel off-scale, like theyre not part of the same tileset. Instead of simply making their features larger, show their scale by adding more detail, such as wear and tear, and have some features that are the same size as those of the smalle blocks.

The characters are rather hard to spot because the environment is as high-contrast and as detailed as the characters. In the middle mockup, the water texture makes the characters almost invisible D:

If you're still open to making changes to this, I recommend posting it in the WIP forum instead of submitting to the gallery. The gallery is for finished work.