I had similar situations in my youth, I have fond memories of hacking games up so they'd work without the 3D models. You haven't lived until you've played Mafia only being able to see the player's shadow beating up the target's shadow with a bat.
Yes, anything that was statically lit was fine. The game had absurdly low graphics requirements for modern standards, but even so I didn't have a GPU, just integrated graphics. So hacking the game to not render dynamically lit items was enough to make it playable (also needed some tweaks that would let it even launch in the first place). I obviously can't say exactly what I did though, this was a very, very long time ago (24 years).