>this thread again
There's a DOS/early Win9x-era game/demo I played a few times as a kid without sound because my parent's Win98 PC only had motherboard audio and a 1Ghz CPU that messed up things in many a DOS game due to being too fast but have yet to find any trace of on the wide world of web.
It may or may not have been part of some kind of shareware collection/disc and could've been a mod or really obscure unlicensed Doom or Build Engine game due to its gameplay and vague memories of the Hexen logo flashing across the screen at one point.
The game visually resembled a 2.5D first person shootan of the good old days, it starts with Elder-scrolls esque text scrolls in german which from my vague recollection was about some evil wizard in a castle (You) were sent to defeat.
You'd start out in a garden maze with a marble floor, unusually detailed bushes and a few black benches made out of textured wireframes or polygons.
There was a metal gate leading to the castle, you had to wander the maze for a bit and either pick up a key or press a button somewhere in order for the gate to open.
After that there'd be another short loading-text scroll and you'd find yourself just behind the gate from the last level in front of a short drawbridge leading into the castle/fort/whatever.
Past the drawbridge was a room with a wooden table, trapdoor and two adjacent rooms containing spooky prerendered(?)-looking skellingtons in cells. There was a key/button/trigger somewhere with which you could open the cells and unleash the skellies, it has to be noted that their pathfinding was somewhat broken with them often charging straight into walls or getting stuck behind the table only to "recover" once you moved a distance away from them, dunno if this was due to the game or the CPU speed.
Punching the skeletons to death would net you a dagger and the ability to open the trapdoor, which contained a set of stairs leading down into a corridor.
At the end of the corridor sat a waist-high giant 3D cockroach/shield bug with legs made out of unicolor vector strings, as soon as you'd set foot on the floor it would charge at sanic speeds and kill you in less than 2 seconds.
This was as far as I ever got, tried multiple times to get past the giant roach thing but even luring it towards the steps by scooting back up after touching the floor had a 50/50 chance of getting me killed and I couldn't stab it from above since there was no way to look up or down or I didn't know the keybinds .
Of note here is that the shield roach was not only in 3D but even had an additional moving texture layered on top to simulate shininess to the point it looked a bit out of place compared to the rest of the game's environments.
I can't recall anything about the game's UI, I do remember the player's arm sticking out the bottom of the screen when punching or changing weapons but aside from that the whole thing ran in full screen with no Doom-style bar at the bottom though it may have also been hidden by unintentional excessive CRT overscan brought to you by Bill Gates and Jensen Huang.
Was it possible for 2.5D engines of the time to have voxel enemies or even flat out polygons?
Was this some early proper 3D game that decided to go with a 2.5D aesthetic for reasons?
There's loads of games with a similar visuals from the era, but I've never seen the damn roach in any of them.