By vignette, I mean a little ambient scene thats probably infinitely looped that you could leave on the screen and just let play on and on as an ambient scene that is enjoyable despite not progressing or changing. The background music is a huge part of it but it can also be said that the combined music and video/visual is greater than the sum of either part
Fortune Teller shop from Zelda - Link to the Past
Banjo’s House from Banjo Kazooie
You know, just yesterday I was trying to think of games that have untextured polygon art, because there are some that I really like the aesthetic of. Kentucky Route Zero is a good example.
Carrier Command 2
Kentucky Route Zero
Out of This World/Another World (though that’s getting back into the era where untextured polygons were a technical requirement rather than a stylistic choice)
Avara. Honestly, the graphics here aren’t that amazing, but I was kind of missing the lonely feel of it; some levels had a sort of wind sound playing and the graphics gave it a really cold feeling that I was kind of nostalgic for. Looks like it was open sourced and ported to various platforms.
Ex-Zodiac, kind of a Star Fox-alike.
Rez
I don’t know if all of these are strictly untextured. Like, Carrier Command 2 might implement its pixelated displays with textures, or there might be glow or something like that done with textures. But the general aesthetic is untextured stuff, and it’s kind of impressive to me how nice some of these look.
Some of these (Avara, Out of This World) are getting back into the era where computers just couldn’t reasonably do texturing, and Ex-Zodiac is aiming to evoke Star Fox, which had that technical constraint. But some of them are just interesting aesthetic decisions. I do like what the modelers managed to do.
It has some of the effect that low-resolution pixel art does — makes the brain fill in the detail that isn’t there.