I loved that game so much as a kid. It started with a murder mystery, which was a first for me. Also, the "twist" about the bad guys was pretty awesome for a teenager.
One of my favorite parts came from the very beginning of the game. If you went south from the first town, the VO would say "Avatar, you are going the wrong way!" Naturally, I continued forward and found some fights. They were way over my level, but I did the "inch forward, throw something, back away" for a half hour to defeat them.
We get to the end of that area and the NPCs start talking about some lady's baby, which we could pick up. We (my brother and I) had no idea what to do, so we went back to the plot and kept going. My brother found out that the baby did pretty sizable damage for a thrown weapon so he used it.
About a week later, I'm in the other room when he screams in rage. Apparently, he finally found the mother, but it had dropped the baby off in one of the dungeons when he ran out of space. So we spent three days regoing through every dungeon looking for the baby he had abandoned so we could finish the plot.
We had a lot of fun with this game and it's probably the the first we bought add-ons (Serpent Isle, Forge of Virtue) and finished each one.
what a great story you told there. Who would have thought to use the baby as weapon... haha. I love how you could interact with pretty much anything, anywhere in this game. It made it so much fun to explore. Of course it became evident pretty quickly if you were out of your element because unless you took the approach that you just described by spending a long time fighting one enemy, you didn't stand a chance.
I suppose we have games like this today still but most of them are 3-D open-word games, which i also love but wish there were groups instead of just one person.
I found out years later that they wanted to write a more generic system. So everything had a weight and toughness. They made the baby appropriate for a baby, but since it was a plot item, they gave it more toughness to make sure it wouldn't get destroyed and ruined the plot. At the time, it was just a "what would happen" that I love in gaming.
Apparently games like Divnity - Original Sin has a lot of emergent gameplay but the really big one was Nethack (and much later, Dwarf Fortress). They took a lot of effort to figure out how things interact with each other so I would occasionally stumble on unexpected behavior like when you use a charm wand on a nurse demon, you'd get something special.
I was recently playing Undermine and they had a couple emergent bits of code like if you drop a bomb near meat, it will cook it, or being able to turn on the torches if you are on fire. Those little things are my favorite part of gaming.