For me it was encapsulated by doom 3 for the most part. Games with strong dynamic shadows like splinter cell chaos theory and stalker with a mix of shiny specular effects is timeless for me. When I go back to these games the shadows still feel as good as they did when they came out and the lighting perfectly crafting the mood. A lot of modern games now even though their fidelity on paper is much better just always feel extremely flat to me and don’t pop out of the screen like they used to. It seems like they’re missing contrast and UE5 seems to make this even worse where all the games using it just look like mush
It sucks cuz 2D animations like that can’t be replicated by the indie scene, you need a whole art department with a ton of experience and with essentially the entire industry having transitioned over to 3D those skills no longer exist in sufficient quantities.
Not that there aren’t modern 2D games that look great there just aren’t any that look like this.
Technically, Skullgirls exists but yeah, it’s outta the reach of many indie game dev
its definitely possible, there are a decent handful of skilled and passionate pixel artists still out there. But yeah, its kinda like hand drawn animation where its just so intensive that almost no company wants to do it