I remember playing one of these as a Flash app when I was a teenager and I’ve never since found anything that quite scratches the same itch (or, like you say, ever actually met anyone else who’s played them).

You might be interested to know that, as luck would have it, this was the first issue I picked up when scrolling through looking for a good introductory task to get used to the project: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3168

So this might change in the not-too-distant future (I haven’t started doing any frontend work to support it yet though).