I Checked them out. I'm not saying it is not a puzzle game. I'm just saying it is a completely different genre than the games I mentioned. It is actually a good example to the escape room type games I'm talking about. You just guess, click everything until something happens. You don't know if this is the solution until you try.
There is some searching around involved, but the puzzles are logical (Spoilers for Viridian Room: like getting the combination lock open with the date from the diary).
But after a little sleep, re-reading one of your posts above* and having looked up Snakebird I get a better idea of what you mean: More technical games with little to no room for interpretation. I looked up what Wikipedia had to say about the genre, and it lists escape room games under Trial-and-Error / Exploration relatively early in their article on puzzle video games. I won’t claim that Wikipedia is always right, but a lot of people had their hands on that article so it seems the common consensus is that escape room games are seen as a sub-genre of puzzle games…
However, I get your point and want to help you. The thing is: Having a [non-escape room puzzle game] tag is way too convoluted - so something like that wouldn’t be implemented. But: I happen to know that the search once had exclusion filters. Unfortunately, right now they don’t work. When they work again, you could search for the puzzle game tag and exclude the escape room tag to receive a list of non-escape room puzzle games.
Would that help you?
.* The Witness threw me off. I had seen somewhere around one to two hours worth of gameplay (through a Let’s Play back when the game was released). But since you mentioned that game as an example for your understanding of the term puzzle games, I found it more like the terrible kind of escape rooms you described. I’m not saying it was a bad game, but personally I strongly disliked it: It’s a bleak hellscape with meaningless puzzles and if there was a story or meaning somewhere in that game I would not have gotten to that part before I stopped caring.
I see your point about The Witness. It has been a while since I played it, but now that you mentioned it, I agree it contain puzzles of both types. Better examples: A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build, Stephen's Sausage Roll, Trainyard, Puzzle of Jellies.
Regarding your suggestion about the search, I guess it is helpful, but my point was that they are just no belong under the same category. I believe the appeal to different audiences.