I agree. To me this is very evocative of the pixel-art/retro look, even moreso than the low-poly Doom/Wolfenstein look.

It looks like what those older games felt like.

If the author realizes it, he could make the next Valheim hit.

No polygons in Doom/Wolf3D.

The example from Back To Saturn X2 can be played on a software rendered engine with no concept of polygons at all.

Isn’t it referred to as 2.5D ?

More like a bunch of cardboard figures raised extruded and raised up to look 3D. You couldn't stack floors in Doom for instance.

2.5D would be the semi top down games such as most beatem-ups allowing you to roam around instead of just going left/right as the typical platform or action game, or most SNES RPG's.

Imagine a 3D version of Noita with this aesthetic, and perhaps using smoothed particle hydrodynamics to make the falling sand engine scale to 3D.

3D voxel Noita is something I never knew I needed.

But the engine would need to be crazy optimised to handle decent sand/fluid voxels in 3D space. It would be a technical achievement in itself.

It’d be really hard to keep track of what is happening in first person, but so totally awesome xD

I don’t think it’d make for a very good game though.

Or 3D nethack

Warez on the BBSs. Go Eaglesoft!