One recommended way to play difficult or cryptic retro games is, instead of looking to YouTube playthroughs or GameFAQs when stuck, looking for help and hints only in the (digitised) pages of contemporary magazines.
More challenging, but more immersive to the era and arguably more fun.
#retrogaming
For adventure games the Universal Hint System is great for spoiler-free progressive hints that point you toward answers without immediately spoiling things.
(Titles aren’t supposed to hold half of the full text body, afaik…)
About your idea, some official materials, like game manuals, can be a good source of immersion too. Up to around mid-2000’s, I can remember them being pretty good, and even some sites and publishers that distribute such older games include such materials too.
@[email protected] Ah, not sure how this ended up crossposted to Lemmy…
Good point about manuals. There are some games where reading them is anticipated by the game and almost non-optional. I remember early-to-mid-90s CRPGs falling into that category more often than not…
About the crossposting, maybe it’s a bug in the Lemmy software or the specific instance in which it was posted, so I’ll first ask in the meta community for fedia.io.
About manuals, reminds me I should pick the manuals of FFVI to read at some point. Sabin’s first ability always got me confused, since it requires diagonal movements on a d-pad.
