I’m looking for games that have an omniscient narrator, but where the player character is in unfamiliar territory. In Zork, for example, you are told “It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue” when you travel into darkness, but it’s not clear whether or not the PC knows what a grue is.
The reason is that I’m writing a parser game for my soon-to-be-eight-year-old nephew, and I want to add lots of detail about the game world that wouldn’t be known to the PC. I don’t want to complicate things with an expository NPC or device, I just want the knowledge to be there. It’s a difficult line to tread and I’m keen to see examples of other games that have managed it.