Or do the different game engines lighting/shadow calculations look different enough to be detectable in a scene?
Depends on the game.
For example using the default scenes as a base there are tell-tale indicators that give something away as being UE3/4, IdTech 4/5, or Unity based. When they show up you can be almost certain.
At the same time, some games will shake things up enough that those signs aren’t around, which makes it hard or impossible to tell from a screenshot.
If a project isn’t using the default scene setup (Skybox, Lighting, Image Effects, etc) its usually quite difficult to tell which engine it is using. For example, would you have guessed that these screenshots are Unity? 
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rB2qL
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I really hate when I get baited into Arowx threads, but I mean… come on.
Can you tell if an image was edited in Photoshop or GIMP? Can you tell if a song was created in Garage Band or FL Studio? Can you tell if a dish was washed with Dawn or store brand detergent? Can you tell by watching a film if the director is right- or left-handed?
If a developer is lazy and uses obvious default settings for something, or included assets… maybe? But the lighting/shadow consideration is ridiculous. So much more goes into lighting a scene than just the engine behind the scenes. It’s possible to make a weak lighting engine look good with the right style, and a highly advanced engine look horrible with crap textures.
Also, who cares?
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Generally yes. There is something ‘floating around the light’ that show the way. That said, it is increasingly difficult from a screenshot.
I don’t have the eye for it. But as a coder I can identify a Unity game in about half a second from its file structure.
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Unity’s terrain is a dead giveaway.
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UE3 games for the most part with the watery look. Also walking around ITSEC before everyone started moving away from the CryEngine you could tell from the water from a mile away.
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That’s a great looking scene, and I think it shows how much the gap has narrowed (at least in terms of indoor stuff) between Unity and some of the other engines, yet I can still tell the difference. Especially if you take archviz scenes (which are generally low on post-processing effects) rendered in Unity and compare them to other engines, there’s less cohesion, a sort of stark transition of the lighting when looking between occluded and unoccluded areas. I have no idea if it’s the case, but my best guess is that Unity’s diffuse lighting calculations have less quality (maybe fewer iterations or something like that) than some of the alternatives, making the lighting less smooth.
Anyhow, despite the fact that this issue bothers me, I’m pretty happy with the engine in general, and there’s probably a lot of stuff you guys have to do to keep things running on every which device and platform, but it sure would be good to have lighting on par with UE or Cryengine, at least as a choice.
Older engines like Quake & Source - yes. UE3 also included, they have that shiny, plastic look.
Modern engines - harder/impossible
3D games, yes.
Unreal Engine 4 has that annoying specular and the lighting looks excessively ‘round and volumetric’, Unity has that non-sharp blurry textures look no matter how high resolution are the textures and CryEngine has that really hard sharp look with a pretty high contrast.
Stylized games, I just had to look at Firewatch shadows and immediately knew that it was made in Unity haha.
I can also tell when they are made in Unity when playing them because of the ugly irregular framepacing issues that cause stutter no matter how consistent is your framerate.
It is probably easy to tell for mobile games since most of the mobile games are being developed using Unity. 
Unity Rules mobile games.
That’s actually very likely, especially if you’re talking about this screen:
Unity specular highlights have very specific/unique look to them, same applies to reflection probes. This scene looks like it might be using standard unity shader, so unity would fairly high on the list of candidates.
In the later screens postprocess improves the situation, but, still…
but still, it may be possible to guess the engine.
Now, if the guys replaced standard shader completely with their own solution, guessing the engine would be much harder.
That’s an awesome reel. Really shows how much Unity has improved in the last few years!
Can’t tell between engines, but it seems the lighting/shadows are giveaways to other devs.
I have a weird ability to recognize the software used to create 3D models. Mostly coming from Maya, Blender or Max, usually when the model is still untextured.
I can tell when a textured organic model is made in Zbrush vs other modeling software. Mostly to do with how artist go crazy with detail when modeling in Zbrush compared to normal polygon modeling and end up baking all of it as textures unable to convey their former depth/volume 
I remember you also made a post once about how animations made in XYZ versus those made in Quaternion can look different. What was that about?
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Awesome!!
Escape From Tarkov is also another good example:
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It has that typical Unity blurry look made much more noticeable by the AA solution being used on the vegetation.
Other engines forests look much more sharp.
Yes, I am aware that image is a JPEG but I have noticed the sharpest screenshots of that game are always extremely downsampled and the low compression JPGs at 1920x1080 still have that unnatural blur that requires of solutions like the asset Beautify to solve.
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What about this one:
Or…:
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Maybe they are still using the old FXAA, maybe if they use the new TXAA provided by Unity it won’t look that blurry.