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Pathologic.
Originally, this was intended to be a game about three characters, but only one survived until release. We pray that episodes featuring the others will be released.
The main character is the son of a local doctor (to put it very simply). He returned to his hometown after receiving an education at a medical school somewhere outside the city. The return went wrong from the start—his father died, and soon the city was gripped by an epidemic of a dangerous disease with unusual properties. Under these conditions, our hero must survive and try to save the city.

What does survival entail? The player has parameters for fatigue, hunger, thirst, immunity, and infection. Accordingly, the character needs to sleep, eat, drink, and avoid getting infected. Sleep takes up time and increases hunger; food must be found or bought somewhere. Simultaneously, one must find a way to stop the disease. The infection parameter is zero by default and does not appear on the screen—until it becomes non-zero.
What does saving the city entail? Well, basically, everything is as usual—you need to complete quests. Markers are in place with rare exceptions, and there is a "journal" as well. Speaking of the "journal"—it is something absolutely incredible. Pathologic has a so-called "Thought Map" instead of traditional journals, and it is stunningly convenient. The closest analogy I can find is a board with a bunch of papers, like in movies, connected by string links. But it is drawn very conveniently, not clunky—we easily see which things are linked to each other and which are not; we see which branch is completed or has hit a dead end, and which still has options for development—in short, it's worth playing just to see this, no joke.
Accordingly, the Gameplay can be summarized quite simply—we move through the city, collect various information, complete the main quest, and possibly side quests, while also ensuring our own survival.

What is so good about this game? For starters, the correction of mistakes from the previous part (Pathologic: Dragon Utopia). Initially, I even wanted to do a step-by-step comparison of both games, but it turned out to be too cumbersome. But essentially, absolutely all the mistakes of the first part—and this is not a figure of speech, I mean all—were corrected. A YouTube comment expressed this perfectly:

Pathologic 2 is like a video game adaptation of Pathologic

You couldn't put it more ideally. The first part was a book with an atavism in the form of Gameplay, whereas Pathologic can be played as a full-fledged game. However, forget about the first part; let me tell you why you should play the second one:
The main tags here would be plot, dialogues, and atmosphere.
1) Plot. The city we arrived in is not so simple. Essentially, it consists of two halves. The first—ordinary townspeople, so ordinary that I don't even know what to say about them. They go to work, have children, all that sort of thing. The second half—the steppe-dwellers or the Way. The thing is, the city was built in the middle of the Steppe, where there is nothing but, well, steppe. The steppe-dwellers lived here for thousands of years and for thousands of years they lived the same way. The city was built—but where to get food, where to get anything at all to be economically useful? The steppe-dwellers raise bulls—from them they make meat for food and hides for sale. But this is all surrounded by a bunch of rituals and customs, and the steppe-dwellers have no intention of changing it, while the townspeople can do nothing about it—because they have no leverage. Thus, two societies exist in parallel—one close to what was in the 20th century, and others living in a primitive tribal system. The main character is himself half steppe-dweller, and his father was not only a doctor but also largely a spiritual leader. Therefore, he will need not only to find a way to defeat the disease but also to understand the Way, to make it respect him—especially since the search for a cure and the understanding of the Way will be linked. At the same time, our cultural code is felt—the steppe-dwellers may not look like us, but at the same time, something vaguely familiar is felt in them. The English Wikipedia says they were based on Buryats. I don't know how true that is, but overall the city—both its parts—feels different than in foreign games. There is something special in them, familiar to a Russian person.

2) Dialogues. During the game, I suddenly thought, "man, how cool it is to be able to play in the original, and not in English, but in my native Russian." And then I thought—"what advantages does this give me compared to if I were English-speaking?". And I began to read the dialogues more carefully. And what I saw, I cannot unsee now. All characters speak very well, realistically. Simpletons on the streets talk like simpletons, men from the factory talk like men from the factory, their wives similarly. But it's not just about realism—I noticed the named NPCs and was admired by how skillfully a speech style was chosen for each. I swear, if you were given a chance to talk with each of them for a bit, then write a few sentences on behalf of each (not necessarily about the game plot), and then show these sentences to you—you would easily guess which NPC said what exactly. Because one speaks politely and intelligently, the second strongly and confidently, the third with kindness, the fourth with detachment—each of them feels unique. Of course, some will say that I've inflated this plus out of nowhere, but I am sure that now that this thought is in your mind, you will be able to see it too.

3) Atmosphere. This point is assigned to a bunch of games, but people often struggle to explain exactly what it consists of. But as it seems to me, I can do this because the game's authors set themselves the conscious goal of creating a suitable atmosphere in the game. Pathologic is a game about catastrophe. We are looking for a cure for the disease, but the hero also tries to survive. This is not an RPG where the only danger is the possibility or impossibility of winning another battle. We are specifically trying to survive—scraping together enough for food, avoiding infection, not getting a shiv in the ribs in an alleyway, finding a couple of hours for sleep. At the same time, there are many quests and side quests in the game—and it's unlikely you'll be able to complete them all, except perhaps on the first day. Because you have no time for quests when you are dying of hunger—instead, you break into an infected house in search of valuable loot that can be sold to buy food, while praying to all powers that you can still avoid infection. And the game should feel exactly like that. At the same time, named NPCs will get sick and possibly die. Will you find the time to give them preventive medicines? Will you find the medicines themselves? And if several fall ill, who will you prioritize? And have you forgotten about yourself?
Upon the game's release, many complained that it was too difficult. The developers listened to the requests and added the ability to change the difficulty. However, in the settings, they also wrote this:

Pathologic is a game about catastrophe. Difficulty is one of the ways to tell about it. By disabling the canonical difficulty, you can calibrate the balance for yourself, but we do not recommend doing this during the first walkthrough. By design, the Gameplay of "Pathologic" should be barely bearable.

And this is a very correct statement. I played the game twice—on "normal" difficulty (the easiest) and on "canonical". On normal, I just played—reloading, of course, if I felt I had made an absolutely critical mistake, sometimes even reloading frequently, but without fanaticism. Initially, I wanted to save everyone, then—most of them. Toward the end, I gave up and tried to save only those I considered most important. And I received the experience that, as it seems to me, the authors intended—the experience of feeling one's own helplessness, the fact that even saving someone is already a victory. Even if you didn't save everyone.

On "canonical", I played in a style more typical for me—I had already figured out all the game mechanics and knew how best to use them, imagined the scheme of profitable and unprofitable quests, and so on. I reloaded and polished my perfectionism, intending to save everyone at any cost. And I managed to do it. But I received much less pleasure from the process. I won't lie that I received none at all, far from it—for me personally, the dialogues and plot still carried it, and there were some moments (and especially one) that I missed during the first walkthrough. But essentially, the "Atmosphere" point in the list of pluses was lost for me. Therefore, my advice is—if you play, you can set any difficulty, as long as it is actually difficult specifically for you, and your inner perfectionist-polisher needs to be suppressed for a while.

I don't usually give numerical ratings to games, but it was rated quite highly abroad too, so let it be 8/10. However, then I remember that this is a Russian game, which feels special specifically in the Russian language, not like a game from any other country might feel—because it skillfully uses linguistic and cultural means—and therefore I give it my subjective Russian 10/10.
The last paragraph looks as if written by someone who only imagines they've seen foreign things, so just in case, I'll remind you that for about 8 years now, I play English-language games only in the original. And by the way, I've seen a couple of excerpts from the English translation of Pathologic and I swear—that linguistic quirk, the liveliness of the language, its unnaturalness and sincerity are lost there. So there you have it.