I see I'm among the people who went "No, the PS1 wasn't early 3D, The Sentinel was!"

And I feel there's a certain charm to very-low poly, Grow Home/Grow Up is a fine example of a low poly game with a look I like.

Agreed, Soul Reaver is one of my favorites.

I unfortunately haven't played Crash Bandicoot or Spyro yet. The graphics are certainly 3D. I understand the movement in Crash is somewhat limited though, possibly like a 2D platformer or hybrid 2D/3D. Jak & Daxter, its spiritual successor is a fully 3D platformer .

Early 3D graphics doesn't mean playing Quake with a source port that allows you to run it in 4K with 8x anti-aliasing and optional texture filtering. Early 3D graphics means Quake as it looked back when it first released, which is more or less what you get when playing the console ports on real hardware or a an accurate emulator like Mednafen.

I *HATE* early 3D games, I despise them for ugly low poly models.

But I absolutely loved 4-D Boxing (1991, Distinctive Software, Inc.) and Alone in the Dark (1992, Infogrames Europe SA). Those were the games!

Also Descent, if we exclude sprites for ammo and personnel in need of evac, was really nice for 1994 year. And yes, I know it was released in 1995, but the shareware version was shown on December 1994, 1 year after Doom, a 2.5D FPS game. I was smashed by GK 3 demo, the graphics was okay for its time to be honest. Models were much better than in Thief: The Dark Project game. Too bad I wasn't able to find a game when it was released. Good opportunity to play a fresh game was lost forever. Exactly! They frigging killed the good series, so much for the fashion trends. Good, and I don't because I find them look out of place, I prefer vanilla game with slight modifications like adjustibel controls and occasional widescreen. Re-worked versions of the games on the other hand, like Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, are appreciated. Too bad they decided to f@ck PC gamers for no good reason. Fantastic game, very beutiful. A rare example of good 3D graphics (no human model maybe?), it was not the first to use 3dfx but one of the first, yes. Scorched Planet for example was released about a year before it, in 1996.
Agree. Yet technologically Thief and Quake were somewhat ahead of its time. Quake in 1996 had amazing skeletal animation and Thief had a nice sound engine (I don't know the proper word for it) and static shadows were *exquisite*. As for the PS1 era, yeah nothing interesting for me as well, but Tekken 1 was super cool on release.

Good for the nostalgia factor, I suppose, but honestly if the story and what they were trying to convey was quality I can easily overlook the crap graphics.

I found a few:

Superhot isn't quite aiming for nostalgia, but the simplicity works

Dusk might be worth a try

Amid Evil looks nice

Strafe doesn't seem like much visually, I think

Devil Daggers, which you already mentioned, that one got it right!

Prodeus Not yet released, but looks promising

When the first games started using 3D it was really an "eww, oh god why, its butt ugly?!" moment. 2D being visually more appealing miles ahead. Technically it was sure a step ahead and a needed one looking at todays market.

Looking back at the games of that time, the early 3D pioneers, it feels a bit like looking at a memorial for heroes that sacrificed themselves for the future.

I still can play and visually enjoy some good 2D oldies. But the 3D? Worst aged games ever with a few nostalgic soft-spot exceptions like the first Alone in the Dark. But even there its the story appeal; its still a visual victim of its time.

I wouldn't call that amazing, it is just acceptable

I admit that lately playing e.g. Star Wars: Dark Forces 2 with its low-polygon characters hurts my eyes, but I'll survive!

Does this mean some indie game developers are now trying to mimic those low polygon fuzzy texture (or no texture filtering at all) graphics? I certainly hope not, they don't make a game look cool, just crappy. Not the "first one" but certainly one of the early 3Dfx Glide games. I have that game too and I've meant to play it, like thousands of other games in my backlog... I just recall playing a demo version of it in the 90s.

The very first 3Dfx Glide games were e.g. Mechwarrior 2 (3Dfx version), Tomb Raider (you needed a 3Dfx patch for the game) and Fatal Racing/Whiplash. Tomb Raider was probably the first retail game that got 3Dfx support (with an update patch), as Mechwarrior 2 and Fatal Racing were special 3Dfx versions that were shipped with some 3Dfx Voodoo cards. You couldn't buy those two games retail with the 3Dfx patch, I think.

A transition between 2D and 3D was a necessary step for the beautiful standards that the industry nowadays has (or should have). Those polygon-infested early 3D games paid the price of living in "interesting" times.

For me it's not so much the 3d graphics themselves as it's a matter of those early 3d games often having bad controls. Also I need to be able to make out what a game is supposed to be and in some early 3d games it's very difficult to tell what can be interacted with and what isn't interactive.

But gameplay is still king so if that's good then that's the most important thing.

Panzer General 3D , another example for bad 3d , the worst is the ground texture it is like a vomit.

Some things were good thou , maps were not overcrowded.
In current games, they just put in as much stuff in as possible fe overuse the effects in mmo-s especially Asian ones.
Playing those is like looking at a firework nonstop up close.

THIS is what stops me from getting a good many games that otherwise have good reviews.

To me, a lot of the re-playability of old games (and "new old games") is far more about controls than graphics. For old FPS's, I have zero issue replaying Doom / Quake today but definitely favour GZDoom / Quakespasm source ports to do so. Whilst Dusk, Ion Fury, Hedon, etc, did a good job of making "new old-school" shooters in an old 3D style, they would have failed badly had they tried to bring back "no mouselook and can't look up or down for the authentic 1993 MS-DOS experience". Probably my real pet hate is making old school games in new heavyweight engines that run badly leaving you thinking "There's no way a game that looks like this should run this poorly" or "If you're going to mimic the 320x240 old-school route, then use a lightweight engine" (see Hedon (220MB GZDoom) and Ion Fury (92MB Build) vs Amid Evil (4.6GB Unreal 4)).

For pixel art vs 3D in point & click adventure games, I'd definitely prefer a flood of new AGS Engine (eg, more Whispers of a Machine, Kathy Rain, etc), over bringing back "tank controls with cameras that leap about all over the place" from that awful 2D to 3D transition period that very nearly killed off the whole genre. Many early 90's games like Sam & Max Hit The Road (1992) still feel a lot less clunky to play in ScummVM in 2020 than the horrendous controls of Broken Sword 4 (2007). The only real problem with new pixel art games seems to be over-saturation where due to the success of studios like Wadjet Eye plus the low barrier of entry of low budget game development, that then spawns off a huge number of other titles in every other genre (pixel art rogue-likes / platformers, pixelated FPS, etc), until people start to get tired of over-exposure.