Promordia look this way due to the Adventure Game Studio engine.

You know... this is a tricky post you made here. I think I see what you're trying to get at - and if I'm right I kind of agree with you on it - just I think your expressing it stumbled into semantics hard. Well and a bit of rationalization.

What you described in the OP is ambiguity. Irony needs some sort of ambiguity, for without the two layers of it the dissonance that is irony cannot exist. However there is more to irony than just ambiguity, and without checking any dictionaries I'd describe the other needed element like this: for irony, the subject/object must be unaware of one of the layers. If he or it is aware of the two layers - of the ambiguity - then irony does not exist. The dissonance or conflict is fundamental.

Natural fresh spring water from the tap...

Live recordings (or recording live?)

DRM 'to protect the customers...'

Maybe they are wrong, but they seem Ironic to me :P

As for retro, for the most part it means either someone trying to make games for the first time, or don't have a budget to do higher resolution than you'd find on the Atari2600 (about 300x200).

I'd say any good art can be expensive; And bad art can easily be done cheaply.

But what i was meaning is likely a good number of these won't have an artist or a real art direction; Instead relying on lower resolutions to hide more errors and be simplers/faster to make depending on the game.

True, that's the popular understanding I've observed in Germany, however, it's also confirmed by a passage in the German Wikipedia article which says that "colloquially sarcasm is often understood as a form of irony or irony as a friendly form of sarcasm". Similar problems can be observed in the popular distinction of sarcasm and cynicism there, don't know how that's in English-speaking countries. Also often in translations of movies where the original says "sarcasm" you will find that the German or Polish translation says "irony". I vividly remember that being the case with one of Woody Allan's movies, specifically a scene where Woody's character boasts that people have been calling him "the brain" or something and the other guy insists that people have been calling him that sarcastically. That also represents how irony is colloquially used in German and Polish in places where sarcasm would be used in English.

As the #1 Primordia scholar: that's tautologically true. However, theoretically speaking, the devs could've chosen another engine or another theme.
Making a retrofuturistic game with a retro tool in a classical, arguably-retro art style is a particularly inspired artistic choice. The setting, the themes, the visuals were an extremely good, possibly the best fit for that art style and that tool in 2012.
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I can list more of similarly excellent matches across media:

Watchmen is a superhero comic book about superhero comic books
Spider and Web is a parser text adventure which is designed to make use of the guess the verb/bumbling idiot problems (no spoilers!)
Hadean Lands is a parser text adventure ("outdated" genre) for the iPhone (modern device) about an alchemical spaceship (duh)
Primer is a movie about time travel which you're supposed to watch several times to get (likely, on home video, jumping here are there between scenes)
Spectral Stalkers is a print gamebook in which the character gets an artifact to travel between worlds, with a kaleidoscopic effect (which resembles leafing through a book)
Resonance and Planescape:Torment do things with reloads and linearity to debate fate vs free will.

And those are just the most prominent examples of works which are defined by the respective genres and types of media. The list of smaller artistic choices is escape-velocity-infinite:
In Arcanum, character portraits resemble period-appropriate oil paintings and a string quartet plays the soundtrack.
Immortal Defense, a game about a space god created by a military program with whom people can communicate via radio has a HUD styled like, you guessed it, a military radio.
In Her Story, the fictional in-game database software is named for the real database software which killed Infocom.

What all those examples have in common is that they're all matches. Good, clever, observant, creepy, funny matches, but matches nonetheless. Irony on the other hand, whether in its strict definition, or Morrissette-style situational irony, is based on incongruence. A stripper named Chastity is ironic, one named Pussy Galore is not.

Now there are in fact elements in Primordia which can be considered examples of dramatic irony (to quote Britannica, "when the audience's awareness of the situation differs substantially from that of the characters"): And, of course, most dramatic works are by that definition ironic on repeat.

So we the players can say from this side of the screen, "lololololol, in this game, Humanism is a fundie religion! And then they see a human skeleton and think it's a shitty robot! 'Apparently, building a giant airship doesn't require proper spelling!'"

And then there's situational irony, which is a completely useless term that basically means "an exciting unexpected reversal" (everything in modern stories is an exciting unexpected reversal).

The only case in which a strong argument can be made for the choice of a "retro" style being ironic is demakes (of which Retro City Rampage and Sanctuary RPG are commercial examples), where the point is that you're playing a "worse" alternative for the sake of playing the "worse" alternative. (But, say, Shovel Knight isn't ironic, because it's a straight-up improvement of what it references.)

Knocked it out of the park. +1 Incongruence is much better than my ambiguity.

As I said - they are not the same thing. If we were conversing in German or polish, then that would apply. We are not - and thus the distinction needs to be made (to begin with), but also that neither really applies to what the OP is on about - which is really lampooning, spoofing, parodies, satires and homages - some which may use irony or sarcasm, both or neither. So..

OP needs to be rewritten to make some sense - in English. O_____o!/

I don't think those contradict me. The tension in all of those between what I called the two layers is obvious to me.

Freshness in tension with artificiality.

Spontaneity in tension with fixedness.

Liberty in tension with safety.

Lots of intelligent posts - thanks all!

I see irony as something which requires distance, where the stuff on the surface is seen in another perspective. Does anyone here recall the name of the drug which make you see the world in this distanced, fish-eye view?

… anyway, when I say that modern-low-res is ‘ironic’, I try to address an element of irony which is so subtle and basic that we are almost unable to recognize it as such. It doesn’t necessarily mean that every aspect of that game is in-your-face ironic.

But you don’t have to agree that the irony label fits. You can just assume that I’m using that word as a placeholder for another concept. But to me, ‘irony’ is the word that best fits the bill.

Exactly! The game could just as well had been made in 1995. Which beckons the question: Why don’t people notice that the graphic is outdated by two decades? If we assumed that there were no ironic distance, that the surface meaning and underlying meaning were the same, then this would surely had been noticed.

Creating a typical 1995 adventure game in 1995 is one thing. Creating a typical 1995 adventure in 2015 is something radically different.

The reason we don’t even get surprised at seeing a new game being totally out of time, is that we automatically interpretative the low-res graphic as being too outdated to be taken at face value, and that this is instead an artistic choice which, like in numerous other modern-retro titles, purposefully uses low-res graphic in order to make the visual appearance pay homage to games of yesteryear. Which is what I call ‘irony’.

I remember reading about I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream back in 1995. Some brand new adventure title based on some famous science fiction story. Sounded good.

And that was all there was to it. The year was 1995 and this was a new adventure title. There was no underlying message. It was not a game that used retro graphic to cleverly look like 1995 adventure game, with the player being aware of this being a heavy-handed cultural reference.

(Of course, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was in 640x480, so it don’t even look as retro as Primordia)

… and this is where we disagree! I see Fez’ use of vintage graphic as ironic, regardless whether it use this subtly or spells it out with some clever 3D gimmick.

Let’s look at the ultimate definition of ‘irony’, which I just made up:

Irony is hollow and pretentious, and hipsters loves it.

Now, there’s a lot of great modern games with low-res graphic. I’m not out to disqualify them or anything. A lot of them are actual masterpieces.

But somehow they rubs me the wrong way, like there’s something distanced, hollow and hipster-like about them.

People didn’t play Doom because they wanted to play an ‘old-school retro-shooter’. People didn’t play Rogue because they wanted to play a ‘true roguelike’. But today, a lot of game seems mostly about playing that your playing a game.

Paper Sorcerer is a RPG, sure thing. But it’s not as much about roleplaying in a fantasy setting, as it is about roleplaying that you’re playing an old RPG. My mind keep returning to the screen-within-the-screen in You Have to Win the Game, which quite literary adds a certain distance to the actual game. If we don’t call this irony, then we better invent a new word so we can talk about this stuff.