#although i don't think LTTBMC would run on a mac

[gothicprep]

did anyone else here grow up with the nancy drew pc game series when they were a kid? those were my lifeblood in elementary school, and while i still do very much stan, the games are really old at this point and it's hard to get them to run, especially if you using macOS.

imo the market these games occupied has never been correctly filled in the time since the nd games' production schedule ground to a halt, even though i know they were a very niche product to begin with. i think people forget about this now, but in the late 90s and early aughts, it was still pretty unusual for children to have video game consoles and it was kind of assumed that the entire market for games were boys and men. so there was an additional prong of the gaming industry that was more geared towards young girls, but they were generally pc games that didn't ask a lot of your computer for them to work. there are some indie games that kinda scratch the same itch if you look for them, but i loved how these hit a very specific cross-section of "unapologetically sort of janky", "popular enough that you could buy them at walmart or target", and "possible to beat even if you thoroughly suck at video games".

imo "life is strange" is the closest thing we've gotten in recent years in terms of it being plot driven, the spiritual successor of point and click adventure games wrt the mechanics of it, and in the grey area of "hidden gem" and "decidedly mainstream", but lis doesn't exactly have puzzles in it.

and to add insult to injury, the development co still exists and still cranks out a game every few years, but they've moved away from the point and click format and did a really bad job modernizing the engine in general. the most recent game took an insane amount of processing power to run, which sort of defeated the purpose of "here's a game you can enjoy, even if you don't have a gaming pc/aren't running a bitcoin mine in your basement". and even if you did, it still ran poorly and looked bad. the point?! what was it?!