"Papers, Please" is a masterpiece. Obra Dinn I must have made some mistake, because it stopped giving me clues after way too few stories to match anything else.
First off, the game is tough but fair. I’ve seen a lot of people say out loud what the correct solution is, but not punch it in because the game could be tricking them. In fact, the game would rather give you a hard puzzle and help you solve it rather than giving you an easy puzzle and trick you away from the solution.
Second, the game does a a neat trick of using very contrived game-y mechanics (the magic of the pocket watch) to present information, but only to enable that information following fairly natural real world logic, rather than puzzle game logic. People are unexceptional — they hang out with their peers, use more or less familiar language depending on who they’re talking to, stick to their jobs unless shit is hitting the fan (and even then, their job informs how they react).
This is really what the game is all about. It's amazing when you're going through a scene for the 10th time and pick up on a huge clue that's been hiding in plain sight all that time.
I might have had a couple of lets say educated guesses, but the rest was hard work piecing together details.
Easily one of my favorite games ever, and I've been playing for almost 40 year now.
That being said, I got stuck and brute forced my way to one or two solves, only to find out at the very end (talking to a friend who completed it) that I had missed a crucial and very helpful detail. Made it obvious that's why I was stuck trying to brute force, which was deeply unpleasant by design: the triple-match made that very tricky and only once I got the search set down a lot.