The best puzzle games like Pentiment are Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol and Norco. Below are 5, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to puzzle costs you.
Filtering to puzzle means you want to understand something rather than execute it. It is the right filter when what you liked was the click of working out how a system worked.
What you get: The moment of understanding as the reward. Good puzzle games teach a rule, let you feel clever, then show you the rule was smaller than you thought.
What made Pentiment worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the puzzle part of that answer, and only the puzzle part.
Deduction with no hand-holding and a visual style just as committed.
Pure deduction, stripped of everything else, and very good at it.
Southern gothic point-and-click with the same literary weight.
An open murder investigation where you decide when you have enough to accuse.
A crime reconstructed from fragments, with the same refusal to confirm you got it right.
Momentum. Puzzle games are paced for twenty minutes at a time and most of them get worse past an hour.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Pentiment that are not puzzle games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Pentiment — 10 picks, no genre filter.
Return of the Obra Dinn. Deduction with no hand-holding and a visual style just as committed.
No. Pentiment released on the Xbox Series X|S, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Rarely. A friendly art style is not a difficulty setting — some of the hardest games ever made look like children's books.
In a well-designed game the piece you are missing was taught two rooms ago. If a solution only arrives by trying everything, the design is the problem, not you.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Pentiment list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is puzzle — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the puzzle guide for where to start in the genre generally.