consists of eight chapters framed by a purely narrative audiovisual intro and outro. In a self-experiment, it took about 16 hours to play through the app, about five hints outside of the game were used (taken from a playthrough video on YouTube). Like in the earlier game, the story was created visually by still images with some smaller aspects moving (e.g. lips, when a character is talking) and auditorily by a narrator and the characters’ voices. The plot of the game is to investigate a series of burglaries possibly connected to the tour of two famous musicians by following their trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It shows a high level of intermedial references within the series as well as in relation to other pop-cultural aspects.

In the dimension of representation there are twelve male* characters, five of them teenagers, including the protagonists Justus (in the US-American original series he was called Jupiter), Peter and Bob, who are represented by voices, but not shown. Four more male* adults are mentioned, but don’t appear on scene; in addition, the narrator’s voice is male*. Six characters are female*, two of them teenagers, two more women* and one girl* are mentioned. So, males* are represented about twice as often as females*. It is also interesting that analyzing the whole audio play series as a reference there is an average of 31 % females* (excluding the three main characters, who feature in every episode), so 33 % (on scene) females* in this app respectively 40 % excluding the three main characters is a comparatively balanced gender ratio. Additionally, most of the key figures of the crime story are male: the three investigators, obviously, their client, the two musicians, whose tour is abused for criminal actions, and the thief and his client – so crime is assigned to male characters. The crime story itself without the side stories and complications would basically work with this core cast.

For further aspects that may be addressed within the dimension of representation as well as explanations and examples for the other dimensions see Schuhmacher 2023.

Considering the characters, a positive aspect is that Bob’s mother – who is usually portrayed as mother or wife – appears as an estate agent responsible for a complex transfer of a complete house from Los Angeles to San Francisco this time, and according to her own statement earns an important sum of money in doing so. However, apart from that, the female* characters are mostly weak or annoying: Heidi Kattler, a blogger from Germany (displayed as overweight and wearing a traditional Bavarian ‘Dirndl’), keeps interfering with the three investigators and even blackmails them to gain more followers. Kelly, Peter’s girlfriend, is jealous because Peter spends much time with his best friend Jeffrey. (Peter, on the other hand, has no idea what his girlfriend’s interests are.) They solve the situation, but this takes an exhaustingly huge amount of time during which Peter and thus the player cannot work on the case. The elderly vineyard owner Lydia Green, as other figures in the game known from the episode (‘The Three ??? and the Green Ghost’) (Arthur 1975 [1965 in the USA]), seems to some degree more independent and self-confident than in the original case, but has to be rescued by the three (underage) detectives, when she irrationally and impulsively runs into a forest fire to rescue a little girl who later turns out to have been safe the whole time. This also takes a lot of time during which the actual criminal case stagnates. The male* characters show a wider range of functions, reaching from protagonist to antagonist, covering client, helpers, victims, and criminals. Justus, described as overweight during the whole series, is again exposed to jokes about his body and even has to wear a corset to disguise himself as somebody else in chapter 8. Neither male* nor female* figures (apart from Justus, Peter and Bob) can be honestly described as rounded figures and none of them significantly develops throughout the story, ignoring Kelly’s and Jeffrey’s reconciliation as well as the fact that the musician Ivan Rubinsky is actually impersonated by a fraud holding the real Rubinsky captive. The only surprising turn is that the burglar in disguise committed all the crimes because his client promised him a treatment for his albinism. An aspect uncommon for the franchise is the homosexual relationship between the musicians Robin Lavander and (the real) Ivan Rubinsky that is hinted at several times in the plot (for example through the fact that they play at a festival that is all decorated with rainbow flags or that they share a house), but is only confirmed in the outro when they are depicted holding hands. This as well as the pride festival is not problematized or stressed in any way, and is thus represented as something normal.

There are examples for dealing with gender or gendered expectations, for example when Bob is supposed to fetch groceries from a (modified) hearse in chapter 1 and is told “now don’t play the wimp” or a comment about how dangerously distracting women* are in chapter 3. Overall, explicit gendered assumptions are quite limited and also in regard to other dimensions of identity, e. g. race/class, there are some hints of reflecting the original episode from the 60s/70s when in chapter 7 Bob comments on the Mexican vineyard workers: “How simple the huts and how superstitious their inhabitants were on our first visit! I bet most people today can only shake their heads at that.”

Overall, there are few (but some) gender-specific comments or activities throughout the plot. Gender relations are reproduced by the constellation of characters and the male dominance therein rather than on the surface of the game. Something similar can be said about the activities the player has to accomplish by pointing and clicking (and collecting and using) as well as in minigames. For example, the player, always from the perspective of one of the three investigators, has to collect locusts (to feed a chameleon) or guitars (to gain information from the client and afterwards the trust of Robin Lavender), find, sort and repair objects connected to old cases, secretly investigate and document the musicians’ house, choose and buy books under certain conditions, explore and evaluate the area of a scene, save paintings from an approaching fire, collect information, build a camera obscura etc. Compared to the game from 2016, there are more narrative parts and longer and more frequent dialogues. The activities seem to be less action-oriented; the whole plot has a weaker dynamic. The minigames comprise sorting games based on shapes and/or sounds, a 3D puzzle, cloze tests, anagrams, conducting a dialogue by choosing the right topics, inspecting a picture for certain aspects, a game similar to table tennis, shooting at moving targets (with water to extinguish a fire), moving through labyrinths, sometimes with obstacles and antagonists, bringing pictures or picture fragments into the right order and disguising Justus by choosing the right requisites at the right time. Some of these minigames can be coped with by trial and error, most demand at least some level of concentration and/or thought. The ambition seems to be lower than in the game of 2016. The game is recommended for players aged 10 and above (Google Play Store 2023).

The game is recommended for young female detectives aged 8 and above (Google Play Store 2023a) and is thus suitable for younger children than the game, which should be kept in mind when comparing the two. The titles arouse significantly different associations: while the game refers to some unknown plan and a (probably criminal) gang named after an animal that is able to make itself more or less invisible, the title suggests a rather comfy setting where something goes wrong, which seems to be a lot less exciting.

The game consists of five chapters, and in a self-experiment it took about 6 hours to play through the app. The initial situation of the plot is that the three detectives Kim, Franzi, and Marie are sitting in a café, referring to the episode (‘Full Commitment to the Earth’) (Vogel 2020). They talk about Franzi’s mother’s farm café when she promptly calls because two guests have complained about her picnic recommendation after their dog was allegedly attacked by a predator in a meadow.

There are six male* characters, two of these Kim’s younger twin brothers, plus one more who is only mentioned. Seven are female*, three of them the protagonists, one more, again, only mentioned. The ratio of female* (on scene) characters is thus at 54 %, excluding the main characters it is 40 % compared to an average of 38 % throughout the entire audio play series. The younger twin brothers are mostly annoying and slow down the main story line like Kelly in the game. Among the adults, there is a mostly balanced gender relationship: the three investigators consult one female* and two male* experts, additionally there is a female* gossip journalist who is explicitly and implicitly criticized for her stile of journalism, but if her aim is gossip journalism, she is doing her job successfully. An imbalanced relationship is present in Pauline Eckar and Lennart Frommknecht, both at the edge of adulthood.

Their relationship is a central topic in chapter 1. Pauline appears to be likeable although not totally sincere, which makes her a subject of investigation. She is in love with Lennart and provides the investigators with excuses for his behavior, such as “Don’t think badly of Lennart! You know how boys can be! One day romantic, the other stubborn as a donkey.” Lennart, on the other hand, does not seem to be very involved, he appears to be unlikeable and arrogant. He says things like “Since when is being interested in motorcycles a crime? But why do I talk about this with girlies!” Part of the game are Kim’s (detective) diary and her connected thoughts that are often shown on the upper edge of the screen. She evaluates the two characters with statements like “Pauline should make up her own mind” or “In Lennart’s situation, I’d be with my (girl)friend”, which shows a critical distance. Lennart later turns out to be a criminal. As he is explicitly and implicitly criticized, so are his gender-stereotyped statements that appear in the game, but only to be devaluated or disproved. Kim’s younger brothers also make gender-stereotyped statements like “You can’t take off your grimaces! And if you roll your eyes, you’ll get a thousand wrinkles! Then you’ll never snog again!” in chapter 4, but as they are criticized as annoying and immature by the protagonists, so are their claims. This, of course, does not change the fact that these gender conceptions like beauty standards are once more read by children and thus reproduced, although with a critical impetus.

In this game the ratio between activities within the story and minigames tends towards the minigames – much more so than in the game. While some activities within the story seem lengthy and poorly motivated in (like searching the house for twelve guitars) the activities in additionally lack logical foundation from time to time – for example when the three investigators want to stick some torn-out pages into a book and instead of looking for glue (or simply read the torn-out pages without fixing them), they awkwardly collect flour, water, and salt to mix their own glue. In the further course of the plot, the players need to gain information by bringing the right objects to the right people, help Franzi’s dad, a vet, during the medical treatment of a dog, collect trash, build an insect hotel, drive away the annoying gossip journalist using a spider, repair an educational board for bird calls, get an old mill running to sharpen scissors (!), clean their headquarters, create posters, examine a house and confront the criminal. Some of these activities clearly show educational or pedagogical aspirations, e.g. encouraging the players to engage in environmental protection. However, they mostly address attitude and not competence or knowledge. This is a crucial difference from the 2017 game, but this article will not evaluate this phenomenon and its implementation. This educational approach also shows in some of the minigames which try to provide a gamified surface for the activities mentioned above: to build the insect hotel, for example, a simple sudoku has to be solved. Some of the minigames can be solved by trial and error, compared to the they are easier, but some demand an amount of concentration, skill or patience that can be a challenge (in a positive way) for younger children. There are some activities traditionally considered more feminine* like cleaning, painting, or dealing with clothes as in a minigame with the task description “Kim, Franzi and Marie are dressed far too lightly. Equip them with warm clothes and pay attention to the order. What belongs where? What suits each type? What doesn’t work at all? None of the three will wear anything that doesn’t fit.” The games contain similar minigames, but they are labeled differently – usually they must disguise themselves for their investigation and styles or “types” are not relevant. Additionally, in such tasks Justus, Peter and Bob are shown only as shapes, their real looks are left to the imagination. Kim, Franzi and Marie are shown frequently, and they all meet current Western beauty standards, being very slender, having symmetrical faces with big eyes etc. (Also, they are all white.)

Firstly, the two games cannot be compared to each other in every detail as they address overlapping, but not identical age groups. Secondly, their concepts differ in some points: the game focuses on storyline(s), is much more narrative and deals with a crime that is frequently represented by acute threats and evolves during a road trip on the US west coast. The game focuses on minigames connected by mostly harmless activities in everyday surroundings with affirmative educational approaches – it is more about the three protagonists than about a crime. Compared to the games from 2016/17, the 2021/22 games are closer to each other regarding quality, tension and level of difficulty, but there are still major discrepancies.

From the producers’ perspective there might be reasons for these differing concepts and designs that are not (only) connected to the gender of their target group. However, consumers see that there is the black original with the criminal cases and then there is this pink, shorter, cheaper, and easier version for girls*. This can lead to the reproduction of beliefs about girls* having different interests, needs, color preferences and intellectual competences. Patterns like the - duality occur frequently in marketing for children, e.g. the Surprise Egg (‘Ü-Ei’ in German-speaking countries, a chocolate egg with a small toy inside to assemble) that was originally for children regardless of their gender and was then complemented by the pink ‘girls’ surprise’ with a small toy that does not need putting together (cf. Mecheril/Thoma 2018: 113-114). In toy and book stores, too, it is easier to find sections for girls* and boys* than gender-neutral sections for children (cf. Brendel-Perpina 2020: 37; Bartsch/Wedl 2015: 13). It is therefore beneficial to address and reflect the issue with children.