I understand the goal of LCD aesthetics and going down the rabbit hole of "how would that look like" in this post. But if you want a long battery life handheld console, why not consider e papers? You could keep the original game experience of judging text+image. No need to restrict the random faces. But I'm not understanding the epaper pricings - this seems a viable option for a self made printed game with BOM 50$, b…
You can actually get really good battery life out of LCDs nowadays. Sharp makes a memory lcd (that the playdate uses, which Lucas is also making a game for) that is very low power.