I figured 
But yeah, no. It’s more in the vein of the Pirates of the Carribean movie(s) : “aside from the whole cursed immortal pirates who are cursed and immortal because they stole magic Aztec gold thing, it’s a period piece !” :D. Plus the ship, crew, historical customs and so on were painstakingly researched and knowing stuff about the period/naval history will make some deductions easier. Basically, think H.P. Lovecraft meets the Aubrey & Maturin series, if that makes sense to you.
The Steam Summer Sale is going on right now, and is a fantastic place to get some bargains. I recommend picking up a bunch of old games for real cheap, and trying out a variety of options. FTL is $2.49, LA Noire is $6.99, and Portal and Portal 2 are an astonishing $0.99. For less than twelve bucks you can have four games that might scratch your itch. XCom 2 is $14.99–a little more, but it’s a phenomenal game.
Can’t recommend Obra Dinn enough. I was legitimately obsessed with the game. Absolute masterpiece.
Here’s another idea: Inside. It’s a minimal platformer that relies more on puzzle solving than on actual coordination, with a surreal yet gripping story.
Oooooh. 
Oooh! Agreed. I’m not much of a gamer, but I LOVED Edith Finch. Totally immersed myself.
Now I’m Firewatch, as it was suggested to be similar.
LA Noire promises more than it can deliver. Its facial animation is more of a gimmick, unfortunately. Obra Dinn is widely praised.
By looking at at Steam page of Obra Dinn Return of the Obra Dinn on Steam , you can see a little below its rating the user-defined tags associated with the game. There is “detective”, “mystery” and “story rich”. If you click on them, they’ll take you to other games with similar tags which you can filter by “top selling”
Observer seems to engross you in a Blade Runner-like world with little/no combat. I bought it but haven’t played it yet but the reviews should give you more info.
For something atmospheric where combat is largely discouraged, Darkwood is good: Darkwood Review - YouTube
Kentucky Route Zero is like an old-school puzzle adventure game, somewhat reminiscent of Monkey Island but with more uncanny/creepy mood rather than humor.
From what I’ve read about it, The Cat Lady is fairly heavy but might be good if you want something dark.
The Stanley Parable is a kind of puzzle/detective game that gets funny and meta. The detective part comes from finding out how you can mess with the puzzles and gameworld.
You may also want to check out The Swapper and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
I think you should try Bullet Force game
I can highly recommend The Long Dark. It’s quiet and spooky most of the time, except when you get attacked by wolves. I have over 20 hours invested in it and I still haven’t managed to figure out much or survive for more than a couple of weeks at a time.
Don’t pay full price for it tho; it goes on sale for a huge discount all the time.
Do you have any interest in point-and-click adventure type games? Like, were Maniac Mansion or any of the Monkey Island games on your list at any point? If so, consider Thimbleweed Park, a really fun game if not a “serious” one. There’s no combat of any kind, no reflexes required, you can’t ever reach a fail state, and the puzzles are challenging but mostly fair and solvable.
The plot starts with you as a detective in a small, Twin Peaks-type town, investigating the murder of the local pillow baron. It sprawls out pretty widely by the end, and in fairness there’s some weird sci-fi stuff here and there, but I loved it.
You might want to check out escape the room games available in both browser and android. They’re typically free aside from ads, but they can vary a lot in quality. The Japanese ones are usually your best bet and are typically English friendly. My go-to site is jayisgames, but they’re all decent enough.
If you can tolerate early PC games, you can play Robot War, Robot Odyssey, Paradroid, and Hacker via Internet Archive.
Ah I just thought I’d got seriously hit with autism. I really had no clue as to what their face said in the slightest on the PC, and just read the guide for the answers. Occasionally it would be obvious given the answers, but in reality, I think some of us are faceblind to someone lying like that, as if you were a policeman.
Absolutely completely agree, except I’d say Portal 2 is the greatest game ever made. Portal 1 is a good introduction, short, replayable, funny. Second one just ramps it all up.
Cave Johnson, Portal 2: “When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your D*** lemons, what the h*** am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
The problem with LA Noire’s dialog system is that it’s piss-poorly explained - you’ve always got 3 options, truth, doubt and lie. Truth is straightforward enough, “I think this person is telling the whole truth”. But the other two options are confusing before you grok that Lie means “I’ve 100% caught you telling porkies and I can prove it right now”, whereas the innocuously named Doubt is “I KNOW you’re full of shit but I can’t prove it so I’m going to try and get truth out of you some other way”. And the later is the crux of the problem because that “other way” is opaque to the player. Sometimes Cole will insinuate things, sometimes he’ll start shouting like a maniac and badgering people within an inch of their lives which is extremely jarring when you were having a nice conversation with the hospitable widow who you think might remember a little more than she’s letting on. So, yeah, contrary to intuition, “doubt” is the most aggressive option of the lot rather than hedging your bets.
Once you’ve grokked that, the choices the game expects you to make become clearer however. And sometimes there simply aren’t any good choices because the case is designed to be ambiguous.
As for the facial cues, I found them transparent most of the time which is to be expected : they mo-caped professional actors, i.e. people whose entire job is to lie convincingly ; and then told some of those people “look like you’re lying”. Which they’ve spent entire careers learning how *not *to do. So they exaggerate a LOT with the sideglances and the not looking the player in the eye and the shifting about (or, conversely, the chin up, straight stare, “I dare you to call me a liar, pig”).
I guess I’m a good android empath