Potentially Civilization games, there’s a lot of good quotes and interesting things in them. I recently impressed someone for knowing all the wonders of the ancient world (thanks, Civ V)

I’ve also seen a few great games about learning other languages. There’s one for Japanese that’s been on my wishlist forever.

How about Hyperbolica and 4D Golf? Both are by the same developer and show you exotic geometry by putting you in there.

Hyperbolica is set in a world in hyperbolic space, where there’s more “space” in your space. Parallel lines curve away from each other and six squares can share a corner instead of four. You learn about the properties of hyperbolic space by trying various mundane tasks like hiking and serving dishes at a restaurant.

4D Golf is mini golf in four spatial dimensions. You build up an intuition for navigating the courses. There’s even a level editor!

I know everyone has different learning styles, but you actually want the learning to be rote, like a book, despite using an inherently interactive media like a game? I would consider that a flaw, and perhaps even the wrong tool for the job.

If you want a textbook there are lots of textbooks available, lots of videos on youtube that explain topics in depth and in various levels from surface level to tedious detail, what do you even need the game part for? It’s way more work to make something like a game, and what is the game part doing besides getting in the way?

The point of a game is to be fun and allow you to experiment more creatively with different ideas to see how they work in practice so you can learn a thing by doing the thing. It’s a form of hands-on learning, and that’s great.

Something like Kerbal Space Program or Factorio or Cities: Skylines will force you to learn about things like orbital mechanics, telemetry, logic, data organization, observability, and traffic optimization just to proceed meaningfully in the game without ever explicitly telling you that you’re learning. A flight simulator or a farm simulator or a racing simulator or an offroad simulator allows you to experiment with and be challenged with (sometimes in very accurate detail) real issues that the real people in those fields have to deal with and with additional learning materials (again, books, videos) you will be able to learn the same way they do. That’s about as close as games get to being the kind of learning material you seem to be looking for. Maybe you need to be explicitly told what you’re learning, I get it, but if you’re not then allowed to play around with those concepts in real-time, why are you bothering with the game? Games are really not an ideal medium for that kind of education.

If you want book-learning, use a book? Use game-learning for the kind of things gaming is good at.

If you like AC’s museum mode, you might be into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2. The first game is a bit janky at times, and some of the characters are fictional, but there will be a pop-up video-esque prompt to let you know what the real history is, what they changed, and why.

Also, I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet myself, but I’ve seen people learn a lot about space missions second hand via Kerbal Space Program.