On one hand, I don't 100% miss those times unless I can have as much spare time as I did aged 14 to spend walking round a game without necessarily progressing.

(It helped that I only got a new commercial game every few months and maybe a couple of mostly short shareware games, so plenty of time to explore each one. Now I have a massive backlog of unplayed Steam games and still keep buying more.)

But not having hints and walkthroughs to fall back on definitely enhanced how much attention I paid to the game. I replayed various Lucasarts games from my teenage years recently and remembered a little bit from each section of each game, until I got halfway through Grim Fandango.

I knew I'd finished it before but the last two or three areas seemed completely unfamiliar, I think because I first bought it in the UHS Hints era, looked a hint up halfway through, and started leaning way too heavily on hints for the rest of the game.

The flipside is of course that some of those games were near impossible without some kind of hint. The old Hitchhiker's Guide game is the one that comes to mind for me. I read all of the books multiple times as a kid but never got more than halfway through the game. It was just plain cruel to the player.

> The flipside is of course that some of those games were near impossible without some kind of hint.

This is true, but it made winning all the more satisfying. :)

Myst comes to mind as another game which was a beast to figure out. Once you did though, you felt like a god.