I think 8-bit/16-bit retro games were kind of at the apex of 2D sprite game design, and many of them were quite lovely, hence the nostalgia.

The PS1 3D games look worse when you look back at them, because they were not really the next logical increment of 2D gaming, but the first step into 3D. So more like the Pong, Asteroids, etc of the 3D era. They were exciting at the time as a glimpse of where things were going, but objectively they looked pretty bad.

I agree. Retro 2D games are amazing. The SNK games are works of art. Modern 2D games don't quite feel the same. I don't even understand why.

Devil Daggers is one of the few games I have time for. Mostly because I rarely survive more than 3 minutes and a world record run is on the order of 10 minutes. But, Steam says I have over 20 hours in the game.

Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jaTKi-1rz4

Amongst retro gamers there is universal agreement that 5th generation console games(specifically 3d games) aged the worse.

BallisticNG has tried really hard to get the look and feel of the PSX Wiepout games, including an optional PSX shader that adds vertex wobble.

https://neognosis.games/ballisticng/

Valheim is an indie game with a PS1-style aesthetic built using Unity.

https://www.valheimgame.com/home/#anchor4

Kinda.

I know that's what the developers claim, but the game looks so much better than a PS1 game. The only PS1 aesthetic the game can honestly claim to have is low-res textures. It doesn't have the weird texture warping, shallow draw distances, rigid animations, or really anything else that we associate with the PS1.

I don't see it. Those screenshots look beyond what even a PS2 can do.

The Chameleon is another recent stealth-game that has PS1 inspired aesthetics: https://www.merlinogames.com/the-chameleon

The Haunted PS1 Demo Disks are a great place to start: https://hauntedps1.itch.io/

It doesn’t have the warped textures but DUSK is probably the closest thing to a PS1 style indie game I’ve seen.

DUSK is evocative of 90s PC FPS games, not PS1 games. There is a rather decently sized community of indies who use the PS1 style, mostly on itch.io.

there's been a bit of a surge of low-poly fake-PS1-wobbly-vertices horror games lately