Nintendo

Baba Is You :)

no, but for real. Puzzles are your best bet

Snipperclips

BotW and TotK for sure too.

Into The Breach too.

Portal and Portal 2 are now on the switch, not sure how age-appropriate those would be for an 8 year old tho

I would say Zelda, but that might be a bit on the difficult side

Death Squared. Name might sound bad but it's a puzzle game that pretty good

Tunic

Not sure what you mean by "for a few years" but my friend's 9 year old loved Tangle Tower. Great art, voice acting, detective story and puzzles that are the right amount of challenging!

Layton's Mystery Journey

Just to give and answer I haven't seen: I know they recently released a remastered version of Advanced Wars. Not so much logical thinking, but turn based strategy is a puzzle in its own way. And I loved those games when I was around 8-10 years old!

Maybe try Picross? I don't know how exciting that would be for a kid but I love it.

It'll depend on the kind of puzzles they're in to (if they're in to puzzles at all), but the Picross S series is brilliant. Despite all the great games on the Switch, mine is pretty much a Picross machine that happens to be able to play other games.

A few years? As In you expect them to play this game for a few years?

I'm not sure what exactly you are asking for, the kinds of games I think of, for 'logical thinking' are to complicated to be engaging for 8 year Olds in my experience of 4 children. They like watching me or their older siblings play them, but when their turn comes around, they would much rather play a 2d platformer or 3d Mario or Kirby game, than something like astroneer.

Initially I missed the text body of the post, and thought "SMT: III Nocturne" is a pretty good game with moral dilemmas and whatnot. Lots of fodder for thinking.

That might not be very appropriate for an eight year old though.

Toki Tori 2 is a metroidvania that doesn't give you movement upgrades, but instead gates your ability to navigate with knowledge (here's how you interact with this thing in the map to overcome this challenge). The graphics are cutesy, but it is a great game.

Pokemon requires you to understand type matching, so like water beats fire but fire beats grass type of thing, and there's plenty of numbers to get familiar with.

Snipper clips?

Picross

Filament. Beautiful little game. Gets really hard at the end.

Might be a stretch but Ace Attorney trilogy

I play puzzle games and there are no games in that genre that can last for a few years. (Even with user created contents.)

Any established games that actually can last years if you are into the genre(ie. Factorio, Minecraft, Terraria, or procedural content generation games) have established guides and wiki so eventually you don't really think about doing creative stuff cause there are more effective/efficient ways to scale up.

And for games like Zelda:TotK where you can create many different crazy ways to defeat puzzles, mobs or bosses in the over world(since autobuild or zonai devices are disabled inside the shrine), it has that counter side of having to grind for materials or you need to rely on exploits like item dup to keep the boring side down. And, if you kid doesn't even like lego, then chances are those "crafting" games won't appeal to them.

What I think is best, is that you observe what they liked to do more, and then find games with mechanics they would like and have fun doing. And gradually transition to games with more complex progression or puzzles, before you let them try those really open ended crafting ones.

Most crafting games needs some basic skills to get better, cause the things you need to build relies on the materials you have. So you need to calculate how many certain parts needed to gather before you start building it. That would promote basic math skills and planning. Traditional puzzle games that focus more on logical thinking(ie. Talos Principle, Cogs, Toki Tori, Portal) mostly relies on spatial recognition/sequential order of breaking down tasks required to reach the goal.)

Last but not least, fun is essential to drive learning related skills to progress. There is no like one game to play and suddenly your 8 years old would become future a engineer or scientist. But the stuff he learned while tackle all the obstacles game designer throw at him will help him at problem solving for a long time.

Slay the Spire: an amazing rogue lite deck builder. Similar to games like magic the gathering, but instead of going in with a deck, you get to add a card after each fight (or skip this, which is often the best choice).

It requires :

• doing some basic calculations during fights (should I spend all my energy on attacks this turn because I can beat this enemy now, or should I spend some energy on defense instead)
• experimenting with card effects and synergies between cards, and between cards and relics (small perma buffs you get during a run)
• at a higher level, having a macro plan of what challenge is ahead of you and what kind of cards you should pick to face them (pick attacks early on, then pivot to more defense once your damage is there)

It might be slightly too hard for an 8 yo though.

Alternatively, consider Wingspan. I play the physical game with my 8yo with no issue. It's a score optimization game with beautiful illustrations of birds.

• Baba is You: A deceptively simple word logic puzzle game that crucially allows the player to skip the puzzles they get stuck on.

• Slay the Spire: A deck-building roguelike that on the surface level needs basic addition and subtraction, but has a ton of room for skill evolution and expression because you build a new deck every time you play. Does require a fair amount of reading, about the same as a pokemon game.

• Tunic: A cute exploration zelda-lite game where you learn game mechanics by filling in a pictures-only "manual".

• Superliminal: A trippy but visually stunning 3D first person puzzle game all about messing with depth perception.

  Superliminal narrative spoilers

  Narration gets a little meta towards the end, but nothing inappropriate. There is a part with red paint implied to be blood.

• VVVVVV: More action-oriented, but a cerebral platformer that has a lot of lateral-thinking puzzles.

• Portal: Simply one of the best puzzle games of all time. An eight-year-old might not enjoy solving Test Chamber 17, though - I sure didn't when I was 15 when this game came out.

• Scribblenauts (franchise): Cutesy little puzzles where you can spawn in "anything" to help you solve them. Lots of creative solutions to the puzzles here, even if your 8-year-old might figure out that a lot of them can be solved with a jetpack and a magnet.

I linked Steam pages instead of Switch eShop pages because they have more useful reviews and such, but all of these games are available on Switch.