Part of the game is discovery and clicking and moving things around is a core gameplay mechanic. That being said, 1996 game UX was a little rough around the edges, as you said.
To be fair, after you enter your name in the book, the Infomaniac tells you that you have to drag a portrait on to the map to begin the game.
Yes but that only works if the child is listening. Children dont listen to wiggly mad dudes waving around on the screen. They just randomly click around and giggle at things.
They'd do well to play more games like this then! All of the Humongous Entertainment games in particular have a special place in my heart. There's nothing much intuitive about these 90's/00's point-and-click games, but that's mostly the point; to let kids click around and see what works in an entertaining fashion.
Gross generalization. Some are smarter than that.
Nothing to do with "smart", or at least that's mostly irrelevant to this observation. But it's definitely age-dependent. No matter how "smart", it's not fair to expect young children to immediately and fully pay attention to some "random" voice when other interesting things are going on at the same time.
I'm notoriously bad at figuring out video games but was able to grok this at the age of 7. It probably had more to do with the fact that education in the 90s placed a decent emphasis on computer literacy (e.g. "Mouse Practice" for Mac Classic) so I was hip to the drag-and-drop paradigm. I don't have kids but I've read that most grow up on touch interfaces these days due to the ubiquity of tablets so I'd imagine that the mouse context is foreign to them.
I also struggled and quit after 10 seconds or something not getting onto the island ^^
You have to click the red arrows a couple times then go through the rotating door.
I don't remember struggling with it much as a kid tbh.
I've thought about what I used to do with computers before and realized I used to have way more patience with them than I do now. I remember suffering a lot of the stupidity in qbasic and Turbo Pascal when I was 11. I don't think I would tolerate that today. Lego island seems similar.
Great game but they wouldn't make it like that now. Its like a grown ups idea of an interface that a young child would like, rather than something actually tested.