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Back in the 80’s we used to play these games in a group, with one person driving and a group of others helping out. Even then we used to fall back on hints occasionally.
At that time, there were no video terminals. There were no monitors (this is high school).
We played Dungeon and Adventure on 17” wide green bar paper terminals, usually a Digital Equipment Corporation DECWriter II or III.
There was no Internet. There was nowhere to go for hints. We simply had to figure everything out.
At that time, these were the first complex computer games. When the Imps created Infocom they made the top ten most popular games until video arrived in classrooms and homes.
There is a fairly active community of hobbyists that still make text games, though evolved away from the brutal puzzles to more balanced narrative and seamless puzzles.
Using Claude I even built my own platform: https://sharpee.net/.
There a thousands of free text games. Check out https://ifdb.org for more.
Time is never wasted when you are doing something new.
Or exhaustive brute-force trial and error, which was much more expected to be standard back then.
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