I recommend the PC indie-developer game Mount & Blade. I recommended it just over three years ago as a work in progress, and it's still a work in progress, but the progress, though slow, is pleasing. Graphically it used to be "good for an indie game" and is now "mediocre for a full-price game". At the core mechanics level not much has changed, but it now has quests and something vaguely plot-like (generated plot, so not really story-telling sort of plot). Things are a lot more polished and balanced. The player-character face (generated to your own preferences with slider-bars) looks pretty human unless you do something deliberately daft with the bars. Unlike, say, Oblivion's, which looked like crap unless you worked the bars for about ten minutes trying to make a face, any face, that doesn't look more like a sausage.
The price change is about right too - back in 2005 it was $11 for essentially "all beta versions and early purchase of the full version". Now it is $25. The price when finished is expected to be $39, so, er, if the price is increasing parallel to development then the final version can be expected in May 2011. But I imagine that's not the case, it feels pretty close to a full version now, to me.
And there's a free trial version, which is limited in a lovely unobtrusive way - you can play as much as you like until you reach level 7. There's plenty there to give you a taste of the game, and if you like it enough to buy it, you can carry on from your trial save file. However! The current trial version at the website is of version 0.903, whereas the version I got a couple of days ago is 0.950, and the save files aren't compatible across versions, so that may not actually be true.
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