I remember a few post of games made by children in Scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/

For example:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23892698

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26050913

(My daughter tried to use Scratch, but it's too difficult to cut&paste and move blocks of code, she preferred a text based programming language, so YMMV.)

You could look at Adventure Game Studio: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/. It does require some scripting, but you can get away with very basic stuff. Here's an overview of the scripting language: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/ags/tutorial/scri....

Another option I have not tried myself is GDevelop: https://gdevelop.io/. It looks like you can get pretty far without any code at all, although you do that with an "events" editor that is basically a simple visual scripting language.

On a smaller scale, there's an entire genre of 'interactive fiction' text games a la Zork. The scripting / authoring is fairly easy to pick up. https://textadventures.co.uk/

Roblox Studio is a very powerful system, my 8 year old has played around with it to make simple maps and obbys. People have coded Call of Duty style games on Roblox (such as Frontlines) so it's pretty surprising how far you can stretch the engine.

Microsoft MakeCode Arcade is terrific. It has both a block interface and real Typescript under the hood, and you can switch back and forth anytime.