👾 Adventuron
As a fan of retro games and text adventures, I find Adventuron pretty impressive. The blend of retro-style pixel art and simple two-word command adventures is pretty appealing and is especially well suited to introducing kids to the genre. I tried a fairly challenging treasure hunt game called Two yesterday and I appreciated how minimalist1 yet fun it was. It reminded me of the classic Scott Adams adventures with a few modern touches. I knew it had mobile support so I tried it again this morning on my phone and was even more impressed.
Excalibur: Sword of Kings is an authorized port of an old ZX Spectrum game that has been updated to include a built-in tutorial. I think it would be a more appropriate introduction to this type of game than Two for most kids as it introduces all the text adventure command conventions in a helpful way. There are several other free games on adventuron.itch.io as well, although I haven't tried them yet.
Once you've got a feel for the system Adventuron Classroom is an extensive web-based game-making tutorial aimed at kids 8-12, although anyone can use it. Documentation seems really thorough and I think it's something I'm going to show my older kids and play with a bit myself. The games seem to be fairly customizable based on the differences I've seen between Excalibur and Two although I haven't delved into how hard that is to do for an average user.
Unlike a typical Adventuron game it has no graphics and the text and descriptions are mostly limited to two words to surprisingly compelling effect.↩