My daughter (4) is very into exploring cities, homes and villages in Skyrim, feeding aliens in No Man’s Sky, and cleaning houses in House Flipper. She gets annoyed in games like House Flipper because she can’t leave the property to explore all of the visible houses on the block. I’d like to find other PC games that are relatively kid-friendly (or at least with my guidance and supervision) and easy for her to just wander about and be nosy.
Any suggestions? Simple adventure/fantasy would be great and provide us with something to progress through together, but anything that lets you explore a neighborhood and/or poke around in buildings and such would be perfect. I’m picking up Goat Simulator today for that exact purpose.
I appreciate it in advance.
The putt putt line of games. They run on scummvm and my kids love them. Later kings quest, and stardew valley. The lego marvel super heroes on Xbox 360 (I think there’s a pc version) has an entire Manhattan island that they can roam around freely and interact with.
Putt-putt, pajama sam a.d freddy fish are great!
There’s a few short indie adventure games that may fit the bill:
- The First Tree
- Spirit of the North
- Abzu
- Aer
- Proteus
- Untitled Goose Game (Not an adventure game, but good goofy fun)
- Donut County (Not adventure, but a very simple and accessible puzzle that spans an entire town)
I haven’t played Stray, but it may be a good fit. I also haven’t played past the opening scene of Firewatch, but if your daughter can manage walking around Skyrim then I think it should be okay.
I searched for indie exploration games. City of Muse came up.
There’s a list of 3D exploration games on Itch.
Slime Rancher might be worth looking into.
Maybe Stardew valley would scratch that itch. Or some old rpgs like FF or chrono trigger.
The Peppa Pig game is surprisingly open. If you just walk off screen it lets you keep going and you end up in new locations. Hop on the bus and end up in another location. There aren’t many blocks to stop you from going where you feel like going and there’s a variety of activities at each location.
These aren’t exactly exploration games, but they’re simple games that my toddler likes too:
- Animal Crossing is easily her favorite. She loves “helping” my wife pick outfits and fish.
- A Building Full of Cats is short, cheap, and cute. She likes making up stories about each apartment and cat. There’s also tons of similar games in different locations.
- Cats in Time has simple puzzles that she can do with a bit of help.
- Slime Rancher might be a good fit. It’s simple and cute with a focus on exploration.
- Dorf Romantik is a relaxing and cute game that’s a good introduction to resource management. She might not be good at the actual goal of the game, but she likes placing tiles.
- Subnautica in creative mode might be interesting for exploration, depending on how sensitive your kid is about some of the darker areas and creatures.
Sounds like “The witcher 3” world will be a good fit for your daughter curiosity, the guest line however is too dark for her age.
Doesn’t that game feature fully nude characters at times in the vanilla base game? And sex? And violence? And brothels?
deleted by creator
You don’t have to do any of that, but just walking around you will get attacked by all manner of creatures so I would take Witcher 3 off the list on that basis.
If combat is an option, those simple ARPGs could fit the bill nicely:
tchia is listed on steam to release in march
No one said Journey, but it’s one of the best immersive games that let you wander in really cool environments. Might be a little frightening in some parts but under your supervision it should be fine
Monkey island!
Minecraft, 100%. You can set it to peaceful mode so no enemies spawn, and even mess with the world settings so more structures generate in your map.
Since she is very young and has no social pressure towards microsoftcraft, I‘d suggest mineclone, its free, open source and in opposition to bedrock mc not bloated with ingame purchases.
Minecraft used to be good though.
Could just play Java edition…
You mean besides the advantages that mineclone has?
If you could list one that isn’t just “Microsoft bad” sure, I’ve never played it, but I’ve played literally thousands of hours of Minecraft Java, along with several thousand more on mod packs for Java.
Not to mention the very large community of Minecraft let’s players, tutorials, etc that exist for Minecraft, and it’s huge cultural influence.
Not saying mineclone is bad or anything, I don’t know much about it aside from the site listing it’s features, but MC is the OG and huge for a reason, and I agree bedrock is full of garbage MTX, but Java is not.
One?
- mandatory telemetry
- mandatory microsoft account
- modders literally had to reverse engineer minecraft to mod it (closed source)
- you cant download the game without logging into mojang despite the fact that you have to log in to your microsoft account anyway
- constant changes that make the game more approachable but barely any that make it more complex ie redstone (subjective)
- cant be played offline easily
Those are just the first ones I can come up with.
I have started playing minecraft in the browser. Had to pay for it using paypal since it wasnt available in shops. I definitely played thousands of hours as well, made lets plays, have multiple servers.
The reason I dont recommend it anymore is the initial minecraft was very different from today. It used to be about creativity. Today it feels like a race for content. Mostly like a game as a service thing.
You don’t have to login to a mojang and ms account, it’s just Microsoft accounts, which if you dislike Microsoft sure…
The telemetry is far from insidious and is used in many many games as a way to provide data about what people interact with (or don’t) so devs have a better idea of what to focus on. https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Snooper
Modders seemed to have made due with the closed source nature… Again talking about Java specifically, not Bedrock.
Not sure if you’re aware but the 1.21 release includes an auto-crafter, pretty big addition for Redstone related automation. Though this post is also about a 4yo so… It’s not super likely they’ll be interested in Redstone anyway.
Can be played offline if you’ve logged into the mc launcher at least once before being offline afaik.
I don’t really understand what you mean by “a race for content” if anything it feels like the game hasn’t changed enough considering how long it’s been out, they’ll add one or two new kinda nifty things per release, but compared to mod makers… The pace is much slower.
Sure, you can turn around everything as you like. You wanted to hear one, you got many. Feels kinda disrespectful of you to try this hard to be right.
WALKING SIMS
I fucking love the genre, and while a lot deal with heavy topics (struggling to understand ones identity, death of a loved one, accepting loss and grief), most don’t get violent or sexual. I love loading into them and just exploring the world.
I haven’t played it, but that Crayon Shin-Chan game seems to fit what you’re looking for. Not sure if it’s on the platform you want, though
