Broken saves potential fix: I couldn't load any of my recent old saves so I took a guess and replaced the RenPy engine and then everything worked - older recent saves loaded fine.
What I did:
1) Downloaded latest RenPy SDK (7.4.4) zip at
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2) Replaced the
renpy
and
lib
dirs with the downloaded RenPy dirs
3) Renamed the new
/lib/windows-i686/renpy.exe
to match game file name,
/lib/windows-i686/MidLifeCrisis.exe
4) Game loads, yo!
The saves not loading could be an incompatibility in the distributed RenPy engine files (as above renpy and lib dirs). Don't know which version of RenPy you are using vs distributed version. Possibility the compressed version using a different version or RenPy. Sorry, I'm not going to dig into it because it's quite a lot to diff but thought this might help as a fix that worked for me.