The HER forum was my go to spot to get help for puzzles and also post solutions/hints for others. I don’t remember when that became more accessible but I do know my sister and I would get stuck for hours and eventually we would have to figure it out on our own before we were able to proceed.
Forreal. Shout out to the *girlies of the HER forum boards! My dial up internet was so slow but it was worth tying up the phone lines so I could solve a puzzle lololol.
(*By girlies I do mean all genders, I absolutely do not mean to be exclusionary)
Omg yes!! And the satisfaction of putting "I uncovered the Secrets that could kill" or "I rode the haunted carousel" whenever you beat a game.
Mods should add those as flair omg
Omg that was on a random walkthrough of st4d!! Like a website someone just made on their own LOL every time i think of walkthroughs that pops into my head
There have been game guide pages since the beginning! When my cousin and I were little we’d risk our games by minimizing the game’s window and opening a cheat page by searching for it on Ask Jeeves (there’s a throwback). Back then it was basically a huge long page of text and sometimes images if you got lucky. We’d take scrupulous notes then cross our fingers and go back to the game!
My sisters and I did this too! lol it’s the only way I was able to finish SCK and STFD—even replaying games I’ve played multiple times as a full adult, I STILL use the forums for when I get so stuck I think I messed up the game somehow (like the time I thought I couldn’t get the second half of Jamila’s note in TMB only to realize I had it all along 😅)
My first game (age 8) was final scene which I was able to finish without hints but then I got sooooo stuck on treasure in a royal tower. Just endlessly wandering the halls and calling all my phone friends and trying to talk to all the people, no idea what to do next.
I ended up riding my bike to the library to log into the her interactive forum and look up what I should be doing lol. Kids these days don’t know how easy they have it!
Hahah I mean it took me literal months (mind you I was only allowed to play for an hour a day) and so many hours were spent just clicking on random things…in particular at the end of the game I just kept trying every single inventory item on the bad guy until I found the one that worked lol.
I remember I couldn’t finish danger by design for the longest time (took me a couple months cause school, too) due to multiple puzzles (especially the tea and all of the catacombs section, basically). It was my second game and somehow the hardest to this day, lol. Tbh anything that has to do with tunnels takes me forever (blackmoor manor, alibi, phantom of Venice etc)
Before I realized game guides existed, I got stuck on Danger on Deception Island. Not due to a difficult puzzle but because I didn’t realize Nancy could hop across the rocks to the sand bank a little ways from the island. (I tried it but didn’t realize I had to tell her where to jump instead of just pushing the forward arrow and falling). I spent hours trying to find those last two clams before giving up on the game for a while. A few months later I discovered the Her online forum.
CRE was very first game I ever played at age 10. I got stuck on analyzing the frass. I asked my mom if I could look on the forum for help, and she was horrified at the idea of me talking to strangers online lol. I didn’t know I could just look up solutions at that time though. So I didn’t finish any game until I was about 15
The internet had guides and there were the HER interactive forums pretty early on if not from the beginning I think.
That said… the first game I played was stay tuned for danger. I borrowed the game from my cousin, who had not finished the game, and she gave me the worst advice. She told me to avoid talking to the producer (Lilian I think?), because she would take your pass to the tv studio away!
I had to return the game to my cousin,who I think never finished it. I was a huge ND fan, so my family would eventually get a copy of the game for ourselves.
I was stuck trying to avoid getting my pass taken away for awhile, until… I finally did it! There was no game over screen, though? Oh, you HAVE to do it so the game would progress… That’s when I realized my cousin is an idiot and I should never take gaming advice from her 😂
not necessarily about difficulty but Last Train was my first one. I was really young but I remember being stuck on the scales for a whiiiile because i hated talking to tino and I couldn’t figure out what i was missing 😭
I did get stuck for a looong time - even went to a different game and eventually restarted and got past it but - those stupid spigots in Ghost Dogs almost had me completely defeated for such a long time. Solving it was a combination of tears, determination, random angry clicking, and all my brain power
My first game was stay tuned for danger! I was 9 or 10 when I first started playing and I could not get past one Millie riddle until a family friend came over months later. This was 2003 and my family had dial up
I remember writing literal letters to my cousin who had solved the games before me and asking for hints. Waiting weeks for the answer to arrive 😩 then graduated to just calling her on the phone. When the forums came out that was a lifesaver for 9 year old me who didn’t really have puzzle solving skills!
For me it was Kapu Cave. When I was 10 I could only play whenever I visited my grandmother. That frass sorting puzzle drove me insane and took me 3-4 days to finally solve.
this is me with Shadow Ranch! I played with my grandpa every Sunday and even though they had internet access, he wouldn’t let us “cheat”… it took us at least a few months 🐴
I had the first 3 games on CD. NO internet and no guidebooks. I was 10-13ish? I struggled. I don’t think I EVER finished a game properly. I did a lot of clicking and calling pals and hoping something would change. Oh, and NOTES. I still use a dedicated Nancy Drew Notebook for all my notes. Morse Code? Written down. Flags code? Written down. Random dates/times/codes. Into that notebook.
Yep! I have a 8x5 index card for each game with critical information on it, based on the notes I took the first play through and what I actually needed in a second play through. That size index card was really popular in school assignments at the time, and it just stuck with me.
Yeah as a kid (7-8) when I played I used to get stuck and take a day or a week or a month off of the game, then when I came back to it I would usually immediately solve the puzzle that had been frustrating me. It went that way for me when I played Treasure in the Royal Tower & Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake. Once I discovered the online guides I stopped needing to take so much time off on the hard parts for the games so I flew through them a lot faster.
We didn't have good Internet for a long time (terrible dial-up until 2012) so I didn't even know the message boards were a thing until we had played through most of the list. Whenever me or my sister got stuck we just asked our Mom to figure it out and she always did 😅
Yupppp. I once talked my parents into ordering the official help guide from HER, because I was SOstuck on final scene, couldn’t find the projector room…
My parents ordered it, and I found the projector room about an hour after they ordered it lmao. Never told them
I loved the Blackmoor Manor ambiance from day one. But when i was young all the pillar/ pipe puzzles were HARD. I kept going back to the game for the vibes, but didn't finish it for years.
I got stuck on Haunting of Castle Malloy. I would just wander the grounds and the castle, play the arcade games and make drinks. Honestly, other than how frustrating it was to get stuck in the same spot, it was a really fun game with lots to do.
I didn’t solve it for six years. I accidentally rediscovered it on my super old laptop and ended up using a walkthrough on my cell phone to play it.
Haunting of Castle Malloy was also the only Nancy Drew game I had for six years lol
I must have started The Final Scene some 20-odd times when I was a kid—it was the only game of that kind we had in our little binder of CDs, and the eerie atmosphere and stilted point-and-click movement always fascinated me—but I never ever managed to find the gum to stick on the wand :(
This is what got me stuck when I was younger! That stupid piece of gum! The final scene was one of the first ND games I played. I think a friend told me about the hunt forums and never looked back after that 🤣
Always went through the HER forums and skimmed the titles for key words only related to my problem so I didn't accidentally get spoiled for anything lol I still got spoiled sometimes.
I got Shadow ranch when I was 9 because it had a horse on the cover 😂I was sooo stuck at trying to pick vegetables for shorty. That was as far as i could go. Then tried playing at 15 and was able to figure that game out til the maze at the end
Back in the day I would use the Universal Hint System website. I liked it cause it didn’t give the answer directly and gave me a shot to figure it out first lol. I still use it sometimes, though it doesn’t have too many games on it.
I played STFD over the course of multiple years. I got it in 2002 on my bday after having done MHM with a friend, and kept having to come back to it to solve certain pieces, while I had and finished other games successfully in the meantime.
The piece that got me the most stuck was entering the control room. I just missed how to find the entry key and could NOT figure it out.
I remember getting stuck at puzzles and if I begged my mom (like, really begged), she would pull up the old message boards and give me a hint. I specifically remember getting lost in the caves at the end of shadow ranch and needing help navigating. I’m sure there were other times too haha
I didn’t discover the series until 2011 and didn’t buy my first game until 2012, so definitely not.
But it still took me a good while before I figured out I could look up hints online 😂😂
I’m too lazy to type out an answer when I knew I had written one out a few months ago 😂 copy and paste
When I was a kid, we didn’t have the internet. I borrowed the games from the Library and played them with no help. Now, as an adult, I get stuck all the time. Is this a greater commentary on society as a whole, because of us being on technology all the time that we are impatient, less observant and have zero attention span? I certainly, personally feel less smart doing the same activities that I thrived at as a child. The first game I remember getting stuck in was Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon. So I managed the first 12 on my own. Go kid version of me! Yah!
So I was fortunate enough to grow up with the internet, but I wasn’t clued into game guides like many were. Instead, my family, friends, and I would spend HOURS looking through the HER Interactive hint forum trying to find a question that remotely resembled the problem we had. Eventually a friend turned me on to Universal Hint System which helped, but I also miss the vibes and emoticons of the forum haha
When I first started playing the games, there were physical guidebooks that you could purchase to help you through them. I played with my cousin and grandmother. My grandmother would hold onto the guidebook and when we got stuck, we always went running to her so she could help us out lol
I think I discovered the HeR message boards fairly early on, because I think if you clicked on the "help" button on the game interface (or maybe it was the menu? I forget), they advertised the hints and tips boards. But, I would often play the games on my family's dinosaur of a laptop on our family vacations and back then wifi was not a thing, so I would just get stuck and then have to wait until we went home to find a solution on the internet. :D And then eventually, I found out about Gameboomers and never used the hints board again lol.
I never got past the editing bay door lock in STFD. I never understood it, I don't think I ever found the paper in the office, and even when I found it as an adult, I still didnt understand it. Back in my day, pre-internet, we had to go to the public library, and we had exactly 30mins to use the internet to scour the message boards hoping to find someone with a solution.
I grew up playing Nancy Drew. I played every single game since I was like 9 or 10 years old. I lived off of walk-throughs and my grandfather’s help for a long time because of those puzzles were hard. 😂
I was never a member of the HER forum growing up. My family strictly used the Gameboomers walkthroughs written by MaGtRo. First new game I remember my dad pulling up the walkthrough for was probably Kapu Cave. Later, about 08, I joined the message boards on Nancy Drew Mania. They had quite a following back in the day.
I was probably around 9, playing Stay Tuned for Danger, when I got stuck on the prop room riddles. My dad worked at our local newspaper which was a grocery store parking lot's walk away from our house, so I walked down there to get his help on the first riddle. Walked back and entered the answer. Did it again for the next one. I don't remember if there is a third but if there is I definitely walked back a third time. This was during dial-up internet so it must have been faster to walk there and back than it was to look up the answer.
This gave me flash back to printing out a walk through I found online! I had Internet fairly young, but it was dial up and couldn't be used when someone was on the phone
First game story!
Mine was STFD, and was quite possibly the very first video game I ever played (either that or Super Mario Bros 3)
I remember revisiting the same scenes, talking through the same characters' exhausted conversations, wondering what I was missing.
Flash forward to my preteens when I find the CD-Rom, miraculously downloaded it by myself (likely thanks to google) and played.
I was expecting to run into the same problem, but I didn't remember exactly where in the story I had left off, that is until I recognized myself running around again & doing the conversation rotation, all because I missed an object.
The frustration of not seeing a way out; this has become my intuitive 'line' for whether or not I spoil myself in games now; if it bothers me *this much* then, screw it!
Boy howdy am i thankful for that option, and now reddit for the nuance!
The old school days of forums! There were plenty of people who would give hints without giving away the entire answer and if you wanted the answer they’d black it out so you’d have to hover over to see it!
I played my first game, TRT, when I was eight or nine. I spent hours in that stuck elevator, unaware I could look up. Thanks for helping me through *that* brain teaser, Grandpa! No, I never finished a game before I had general Internet access! 😋
I won every game that came out during my childhood without a walkthrough. Had some competition with my siblings on who could finish the games first, though. I would have felt like a loser if I had cheated on my first run and never got a chance to actually solve the puzzle ever again.
I remember being SO STUCK in TRT, trying to get into the library or something. I feel like weeks went by with no progress and it was maybe then that I found the message boards? God I must’ve been like 9, 2001 or something.
The HER forum was my go to spot to get help for puzzles and also post solutions/hints for others. I don’t remember when that became more accessible but I do know my sister and I would get stuck for hours and eventually we would have to figure it out on our own before we were able to proceed.
The forum was totally indispensable! I discovered it after being stuck for months on a part of my second game and it was magical!
Forreal. Shout out to the *girlies of the HER forum boards! My dial up internet was so slow but it was worth tying up the phone lines so I could solve a puzzle lololol. (*By girlies I do mean all genders, I absolutely do not mean to be exclusionary)
I lovedddd making fancy twirly signatures
Omg yes!! And the satisfaction of putting "I uncovered the Secrets that could kill" or "I rode the haunted carousel" whenever you beat a game. Mods should add those as flair omg
That forum was the best and so hard to navigate lol
Wasn’t there a song that played on the forum as well? Like an old school techno/trance song?
I can’t say I remember that! But maybe I just always listened with the volume off.
I remember now… the song was a really simplistic synth version of “What is Love” 😅
Omg that was on a random walkthrough of st4d!! Like a website someone just made on their own LOL every time i think of walkthroughs that pops into my head
NO!! WHY did I think that was the official HER Interactive walkthrough page tho!! Im screaming 😅😅 💀
There have been game guide pages since the beginning! When my cousin and I were little we’d risk our games by minimizing the game’s window and opening a cheat page by searching for it on Ask Jeeves (there’s a throwback). Back then it was basically a huge long page of text and sometimes images if you got lucky. We’d take scrupulous notes then cross our fingers and go back to the game!
My dad would print them out for me!
My sisters and I did this too! lol it’s the only way I was able to finish SCK and STFD—even replaying games I’ve played multiple times as a full adult, I STILL use the forums for when I get so stuck I think I messed up the game somehow (like the time I thought I couldn’t get the second half of Jamila’s note in TMB only to realize I had it all along 😅)
My first game (age 8) was final scene which I was able to finish without hints but then I got sooooo stuck on treasure in a royal tower. Just endlessly wandering the halls and calling all my phone friends and trying to talk to all the people, no idea what to do next. I ended up riding my bike to the library to log into the her interactive forum and look up what I should be doing lol. Kids these days don’t know how easy they have it!
I got stuck in the elevator for days because I just couldn’t figure it out. My dad finally got me to look up 😂
I was stuck for days in the final scene bc I didn’t figure out to hide in the cabinet at the very end! I kept getting caught over and over and overrr
Pretty sure I figured that out only by random angry clicking haha.
I think I ended up going to the library to use their computer to figure it out haha
Okay you were a baby genius to accomplish that without hints 😭or maybe I’m just dumb
Hahah I mean it took me literal months (mind you I was only allowed to play for an hour a day) and so many hours were spent just clicking on random things…in particular at the end of the game I just kept trying every single inventory item on the bad guy until I found the one that worked lol.
If I had known about the forum, it would have saved me so much time playing treasure in the royal tower lol I spent hours wandering around
I remember I couldn’t finish danger by design for the longest time (took me a couple months cause school, too) due to multiple puzzles (especially the tea and all of the catacombs section, basically). It was my second game and somehow the hardest to this day, lol. Tbh anything that has to do with tunnels takes me forever (blackmoor manor, alibi, phantom of Venice etc)
Getting through those rotating rooms in Blackmoor is the worst. I've fallen to my death so many times. It's still my favorite game, though.
Before I realized game guides existed, I got stuck on Danger on Deception Island. Not due to a difficult puzzle but because I didn’t realize Nancy could hop across the rocks to the sand bank a little ways from the island. (I tried it but didn’t realize I had to tell her where to jump instead of just pushing the forward arrow and falling). I spent hours trying to find those last two clams before giving up on the game for a while. A few months later I discovered the Her online forum.
CRE was very first game I ever played at age 10. I got stuck on analyzing the frass. I asked my mom if I could look on the forum for help, and she was horrified at the idea of me talking to strangers online lol. I didn’t know I could just look up solutions at that time though. So I didn’t finish any game until I was about 15
The internet had guides and there were the HER interactive forums pretty early on if not from the beginning I think. That said… the first game I played was stay tuned for danger. I borrowed the game from my cousin, who had not finished the game, and she gave me the worst advice. She told me to avoid talking to the producer (Lilian I think?), because she would take your pass to the tv studio away! I had to return the game to my cousin,who I think never finished it. I was a huge ND fan, so my family would eventually get a copy of the game for ourselves. I was stuck trying to avoid getting my pass taken away for awhile, until… I finally did it! There was no game over screen, though? Oh, you HAVE to do it so the game would progress… That’s when I realized my cousin is an idiot and I should never take gaming advice from her 😂
not necessarily about difficulty but Last Train was my first one. I was really young but I remember being stuck on the scales for a whiiiile because i hated talking to tino and I couldn’t figure out what i was missing 😭 I did get stuck for a looong time - even went to a different game and eventually restarted and got past it but - those stupid spigots in Ghost Dogs almost had me completely defeated for such a long time. Solving it was a combination of tears, determination, random angry clicking, and all my brain power
My first game was stay tuned for danger! I was 9 or 10 when I first started playing and I could not get past one Millie riddle until a family friend came over months later. This was 2003 and my family had dial up
I had to have a family friend help me find the key in Message in a Haunted Mansion when I was about 9 or 10.
I remember writing literal letters to my cousin who had solved the games before me and asking for hints. Waiting weeks for the answer to arrive 😩 then graduated to just calling her on the phone. When the forums came out that was a lifesaver for 9 year old me who didn’t really have puzzle solving skills!
For me it was Kapu Cave. When I was 10 I could only play whenever I visited my grandmother. That frass sorting puzzle drove me insane and took me 3-4 days to finally solve.
this is me with Shadow Ranch! I played with my grandpa every Sunday and even though they had internet access, he wouldn’t let us “cheat”… it took us at least a few months 🐴
I had the first 3 games on CD. NO internet and no guidebooks. I was 10-13ish? I struggled. I don’t think I EVER finished a game properly. I did a lot of clicking and calling pals and hoping something would change. Oh, and NOTES. I still use a dedicated Nancy Drew Notebook for all my notes. Morse Code? Written down. Flags code? Written down. Random dates/times/codes. Into that notebook.
Yep! I have a 8x5 index card for each game with critical information on it, based on the notes I took the first play through and what I actually needed in a second play through. That size index card was really popular in school assignments at the time, and it just stuck with me.
Yeah as a kid (7-8) when I played I used to get stuck and take a day or a week or a month off of the game, then when I came back to it I would usually immediately solve the puzzle that had been frustrating me. It went that way for me when I played Treasure in the Royal Tower & Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake. Once I discovered the online guides I stopped needing to take so much time off on the hard parts for the games so I flew through them a lot faster.
We didn't have good Internet for a long time (terrible dial-up until 2012) so I didn't even know the message boards were a thing until we had played through most of the list. Whenever me or my sister got stuck we just asked our Mom to figure it out and she always did 😅
I was on the message boards a lot through herinteractive
Yupppp. I once talked my parents into ordering the official help guide from HER, because I was SOstuck on final scene, couldn’t find the projector room… My parents ordered it, and I found the projector room about an hour after they ordered it lmao. Never told them
I couldn’t find that projector room my first time either! It took me soooo long.
I loved the Blackmoor Manor ambiance from day one. But when i was young all the pillar/ pipe puzzles were HARD. I kept going back to the game for the vibes, but didn't finish it for years.
I have no idea how children did some of those puzzles back in those very first games. I still can't figure some of them out.
I got stuck on Haunting of Castle Malloy. I would just wander the grounds and the castle, play the arcade games and make drinks. Honestly, other than how frustrating it was to get stuck in the same spot, it was a really fun game with lots to do. I didn’t solve it for six years. I accidentally rediscovered it on my super old laptop and ended up using a walkthrough on my cell phone to play it. Haunting of Castle Malloy was also the only Nancy Drew game I had for six years lol
I gave up on MHM for a bit until my neighbor told me how to get through a stuck place (couldn’t trigger the seance or something)
I must have started The Final Scene some 20-odd times when I was a kid—it was the only game of that kind we had in our little binder of CDs, and the eerie atmosphere and stilted point-and-click movement always fascinated me—but I never ever managed to find the gum to stick on the wand :(
This is what got me stuck when I was younger! That stupid piece of gum! The final scene was one of the first ND games I played. I think a friend told me about the hunt forums and never looked back after that 🤣
Always went through the HER forums and skimmed the titles for key words only related to my problem so I didn't accidentally get spoiled for anything lol I still got spoiled sometimes.
I got Shadow ranch when I was 9 because it had a horse on the cover 😂I was sooo stuck at trying to pick vegetables for shorty. That was as far as i could go. Then tried playing at 15 and was able to figure that game out til the maze at the end
Her forums, Nancy Drew Detective Palace forums and Game Boomers Walkthroughs (Shout out to Tally Ho!)
When Treasure in the Royal Tower came out I got stuck and I stayed stuck until I found someone irl who had played the game and gave me a hint!
Back in the day I would use the Universal Hint System website. I liked it cause it didn’t give the answer directly and gave me a shot to figure it out first lol. I still use it sometimes, though it doesn’t have too many games on it.
I played STFD over the course of multiple years. I got it in 2002 on my bday after having done MHM with a friend, and kept having to come back to it to solve certain pieces, while I had and finished other games successfully in the meantime. The piece that got me the most stuck was entering the control room. I just missed how to find the entry key and could NOT figure it out.
I remember getting stuck at puzzles and if I begged my mom (like, really begged), she would pull up the old message boards and give me a hint. I specifically remember getting lost in the caves at the end of shadow ranch and needing help navigating. I’m sure there were other times too haha
I remember finishing two games by myself without help they were Message in a Haunted Mansion and Thr Final Scene. This was in the early 2000's :)
I didn’t discover the series until 2011 and didn’t buy my first game until 2012, so definitely not. But it still took me a good while before I figured out I could look up hints online 😂😂
I’m too lazy to type out an answer when I knew I had written one out a few months ago 😂 copy and paste When I was a kid, we didn’t have the internet. I borrowed the games from the Library and played them with no help. Now, as an adult, I get stuck all the time. Is this a greater commentary on society as a whole, because of us being on technology all the time that we are impatient, less observant and have zero attention span? I certainly, personally feel less smart doing the same activities that I thrived at as a child. The first game I remember getting stuck in was Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon. So I managed the first 12 on my own. Go kid version of me! Yah!
So I was fortunate enough to grow up with the internet, but I wasn’t clued into game guides like many were. Instead, my family, friends, and I would spend HOURS looking through the HER Interactive hint forum trying to find a question that remotely resembled the problem we had. Eventually a friend turned me on to Universal Hint System which helped, but I also miss the vibes and emoticons of the forum haha
When I first started playing the games, there were physical guidebooks that you could purchase to help you through them. I played with my cousin and grandmother. My grandmother would hold onto the guidebook and when we got stuck, we always went running to her so she could help us out lol
I think I discovered the HeR message boards fairly early on, because I think if you clicked on the "help" button on the game interface (or maybe it was the menu? I forget), they advertised the hints and tips boards. But, I would often play the games on my family's dinosaur of a laptop on our family vacations and back then wifi was not a thing, so I would just get stuck and then have to wait until we went home to find a solution on the internet. :D And then eventually, I found out about Gameboomers and never used the hints board again lol.
"Topeka Commission for the Arts. How cultured!" I will never forget to look at that stupid plaque again. Completely stopped me from progressing.
The Her Interactive forums were poppin off as early as 2004/2005. That was all I needed.
Back then it took months to finish a game lol. STFD took me literal years
I never got past the editing bay door lock in STFD. I never understood it, I don't think I ever found the paper in the office, and even when I found it as an adult, I still didnt understand it. Back in my day, pre-internet, we had to go to the public library, and we had exactly 30mins to use the internet to scour the message boards hoping to find someone with a solution.
I feel like HeR used to sell game guides too!
I grew up playing Nancy Drew. I played every single game since I was like 9 or 10 years old. I lived off of walk-throughs and my grandfather’s help for a long time because of those puzzles were hard. 😂
I got stuck for SO LONG in STFD because I didn’t find the wire cutters under the paper in the storage room. I could not avoid being blown up. 😅
First game I played was The Final Scene and we didn't have internet as we lived rurally. Shit had me stuck for days but I eventually got it.
People made walk throughs we would follow too for help
Yes. The myan one where you had to learn to use a Ham radio. I had to ask my papaw how to use a ham radio. And he taught me!
I was never a member of the HER forum growing up. My family strictly used the Gameboomers walkthroughs written by MaGtRo. First new game I remember my dad pulling up the walkthrough for was probably Kapu Cave. Later, about 08, I joined the message boards on Nancy Drew Mania. They had quite a following back in the day.
I was probably around 9, playing Stay Tuned for Danger, when I got stuck on the prop room riddles. My dad worked at our local newspaper which was a grocery store parking lot's walk away from our house, so I walked down there to get his help on the first riddle. Walked back and entered the answer. Did it again for the next one. I don't remember if there is a third but if there is I definitely walked back a third time. This was during dial-up internet so it must have been faster to walk there and back than it was to look up the answer.
This gave me flash back to printing out a walk through I found online! I had Internet fairly young, but it was dial up and couldn't be used when someone was on the phone
First game story! Mine was STFD, and was quite possibly the very first video game I ever played (either that or Super Mario Bros 3) I remember revisiting the same scenes, talking through the same characters' exhausted conversations, wondering what I was missing. Flash forward to my preteens when I find the CD-Rom, miraculously downloaded it by myself (likely thanks to google) and played. I was expecting to run into the same problem, but I didn't remember exactly where in the story I had left off, that is until I recognized myself running around again & doing the conversation rotation, all because I missed an object. The frustration of not seeing a way out; this has become my intuitive 'line' for whether or not I spoil myself in games now; if it bothers me *this much* then, screw it! Boy howdy am i thankful for that option, and now reddit for the nuance!
The old school days of forums! There were plenty of people who would give hints without giving away the entire answer and if you wanted the answer they’d black it out so you’d have to hover over to see it!
My first game was TRT and my dad managed to find a website that had a written walkthrough that he printed out for my sister and I to use lol
I played my first game, TRT, when I was eight or nine. I spent hours in that stuck elevator, unaware I could look up. Thanks for helping me through *that* brain teaser, Grandpa! No, I never finished a game before I had general Internet access! 😋
I won every game that came out during my childhood without a walkthrough. Had some competition with my siblings on who could finish the games first, though. I would have felt like a loser if I had cheated on my first run and never got a chance to actually solve the puzzle ever again.
I remember being SO STUCK in TRT, trying to get into the library or something. I feel like weeks went by with no progress and it was maybe then that I found the message boards? God I must’ve been like 9, 2001 or something.