[dschuessler]

There are video games out there that pose challenges very similar to the one's one encounters when programming. Several commenters have mentioned in other threads that Factorio is such a game. (I never played it myself.) If that's the kind of game your brother is interested in, you might sell him on programming by saying: "In essence, it's just that, but paid."

I remember playing an educational web game long ago where you had to program a robot with a limited set of control flow statements so that it could autonomously reach a goal. The game had an isometric perspective and the robot had to react to all kinds of obstacles. If anyone remembers this game, please post a link. It was great but I didn't bookmark it.

[ftkftk]

This sounds like https://lightbot.com/. This app really helped my son think through problem solving sequentially before moving on to Scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/.

Since Op's brother is an adult he may be better served with a Raspberry Pi, which is not quite as "cutesy", but can still be interfaced with a drag and drop programming language like Scratch. Then one can graduate to more advanced projects. Check out https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en for inspiration.

[dschuessler]

Yes, that must be it! Thank you. Looking in the Wayback Machine, there was a Flash version years ago. I must have played that.