Today I decided to try one of the games mentioned in the thread.
I chose Parhedros, because the demo is available from the developers website. As you may see below, the game is ugly as fuck, and poor art direction does not help. Neither do pixelated boobs. Anyway, the character creation was very promising, akin to Arcanum. 4 races, rolling lots of numerous stats (and more skills to come later!), choosing your traits of character and the group/faction in faerie society to which you belong. Very nice. Than during an intro you get a quest from the faerie queen and off you go to the dungeon.
You walk around the dungeon in a veeeeeeryyyyyyyy slooooooooow maaaaaaaaaneeeeeeer and I guess there is no option to run. Combat is turn-based and actually quite challenging. When you meet one of the few NPCs, you can speak with them by typying words and receiving answers. The system seems quite well developed and you can get different reactions based on what you write. Not that the conversation does make any sense, though...
However the game is not very playable. Walking is too slow, enemies, even the first ones you meet are very powerful and eat your for breakfast. There is no savegame function - in theory the game should save itself every few seconds, but each time I died a save from the very begining of the dungeon loaded. So, it's basically a roguelike. With rich NPC interactions, or something. And pretty developed magic system.
Plus there is photoshopped nudity (during loading screens) and songs when you pray to the statues or cast spells.
All in all, a very bizarre experience. I do not really understand, what the creators of this game tried to achieve. An intriguing, but finally completely wasted effort.