It definitely stops it from standing out as obvious to my eye so yes, looks better 
A hint of shadow wouldn't go astray either:
I like that.
Contrast should be lower in the darkness, shouldn't it ?
When playing with shadows, don't forget these 3 parameters...
Guys my palette is only 16 colors. I mean, it's a FAKE limitation, since I want to do some kind of shadow overlay thing later (I mocked it up somewhere) but I'm still only using 16 colors for the tiles and everything.
Here's my palette:
I'm not really using the top pink and purple much, but I don't think another blue-green would add a lot. (Would it? I know human eyes are really sensitive to greens. Maybe I need a warm green, or a cooler medium grey?) I guess I was going to use that purple for neato purple shadows or something but I never did and it just ended up another not-quite-black that's too saturated to use for much anti-aliasing but fills out my purple/pink color ramp. (Edit: Actually, I'm using it in my floorboard tiles so that's something I guess.) That background dark grey is not actually part of my palette, I just don't like the bright color of the forums these days...?
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For the walls close to the player, I was thinking of doing something like this, like the wall is cut out?
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New death animation. Mocked up a little blood spatter effect just to see what it would look like but it's not finished or anything.
