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The Pathologic 3 prologue is now available, but I don't know if I recommend it. The structure isn't linear temporally, and the imsim elements were a big part of the draw of the first two for me. You play as the bachelor, and like in the second game you do a lot of diagnosing people, but as the bachelor has a proper education diagnosing makes a lot more sense to me than as the haruspex (which I appreciated) but the gameplay loop is very similar. The new survival mechanics are... Odd. This time you have to manage the bachelor's mood, and maintain a balance between depression and mania, with differential actions tilting you one way or the other, and drugs maintaining the balance. So if you see a dead kid on the sid of the road you tilt towards depression and if you see people fighting you tilt towards mania, and you can take morphine to lower mania and amphetamines to lower depression. It works alright mostly, but I think it's bugged because the bachelor is perpetually one diagnosis mistake away from blowing his brains out. Also you have to assign your drugs to hotkeys to use them without going to the inventory but it doesn't indicate what's in your hotkeys, so I keep accidentally blowing my brains out when I forget which drug is where. It does make me want to play pathologic 2 again though, I wonder if there are any good mods for it?
I also played a neat little indie horror game called Rooten which I do recommend, it's an adventure game (with minor combat elements) that sees you dropped off in a forest near a small research camp whose researchers discovered a new fungus but now have all disappeared. There's none of what I'd call handholding, but you have an objective beyond 'explore' so I don't think it would be a good fit for @coffee_enjoyer's request. (Proteus is the only game I can think of like that, but unlike @problem_redditor I don't think it gets away with anything, for the past decade it's been my go to 'this is why you need at least some direction in video games' example.) However if you like games like yume nikki and strange telephone, Rooten might tickle your tights.
Proteus is a game that's certainly not for most people and I think it could absolutely grate on a player (it's not my preferred style of game either, I'm a very extrinsically-motivated player); it's just fine-tuned to a hyper-specific target audience which it seems @coffee_enjoyer falls into, which is what made me recommend it.
In general I’m just a fan of very targeted experiences that don’t reek of overengineering. From the start there are no pretensions that it's going for any kind of mass appeal, and I respect a game that firmly markets itself to a specialised niche without compromise, far more than I do a game that seems to be trying to achieve several mutually exclusive goals in an attempt to be a widely acclaimed hit. Most open world games in my opinion are juggling contradictory goals of telling a linear story and maintaining a constant stream of content while at the same time still trying to maximise player freedom, and as a result they very rarely deliver on most of what they promise. At the very least Proteus actually does successfully achieve what it is going for, whether the experience it's optimising for appeals to you or not is a different question. There's a difference between a bad game (i.e. one that doesn't achieve what it intended to) and a game that does what it set out to do but isn't catering to you.
Yume Nikki is actually another great example of an exploration-based game without any clear direction, can't believe I forgot that one. I can't say I like that game, but I certainly appreciate it.
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I really like the premise and I'm going to watch the game carefully if it ripens into something worthy of attention.
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