Intellectually stimulating gaming sites for children

Question

I have an 8-year-old daughter who's intellectually curious but who has, thanks to one of her friends, locked onto a trashy online game site that's a honey pot for advertising, and which is only just usable because of uBlock Origin. Aside from one called Monkey Mart - which involves running a supermarket, including keeping shelves topped up, paying for helpers in the shop, feeding animals to get produce etc. - the quality of the games is in general very low - just dress-up things with sparkly sounds targeted squarely at the stereotype of a girly girl. I don't mind that kind of thing in moderation, figuring that banning that kind of stuff just makes it more alluring and that with guidance she'll grow out of the trashier side of those things eventually, but I'd like her to be picking games from a broader pool which includes things that are more intellectually stimulating. (By which I don't mean worth or boring - they need to be fun too). Can anyone recommend a good single source of games like that? She plays Minecraft and codes on both Scratch and code.org, so a balance between all those kind of games would be ideal.

rcfox · Accepted Answer

When I was around that age, I was really into Final Fantasy and the Dragon Warrior series on the NES. I partially attribute them with developing my reading skills and vocabulary.
NES games might be a hard sell for a kid who's already been exposed to flashier games, but the SNES visuals hold up pretty well, and have some of the best RPGs: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, Secret of Mana, etc. There are also the Pixel Remaster versions of Final Fantasy 1-6 available on PC and modern consoles. Of course, the problem with RPGs is they're mostly about performing violence...
https://shapez.io/ - Shapez is sort of a Factorio-lite. You "mine" shapes, and perform operations on them to satisfy the game's requirements. It starts out pretty simple, but the difficulty ramps up. The demo is playable in the browser.
https://www.openttd.org/ - OpenTTD is essentially a virtual train set. Yes, there are other modes of transportation available, but the trains are where it shines. Might not really be suitable for a child to play solo, it's rather complex.