First off, my apologies for the late reply. I had submitted this game completely on a lark after reading a Reddit post and simply forgot all about it!  As for the riddles, no, there are no hints, sorry. I can spoil them for you if you wish. The locked doors are the locations of the subsequent Oracles, each of offering the next riddle in a fixed order. The search function only actually does anything after all the riddles have been solved. 

In short, it’s an unsatisfactory game because it’s incomplete. It was a proof of concept work that I finished just in time for ASCII art’s funeral, lol. I had planned on making it procedurally generated, or at least I believed at the time I could pull it off. As it was, I hand-crafted each and every frame (over 400, IIRC)  using an old ASCII art drawing program called TheDraw. 

Anyway, thanks seriously for your interest and play test!  I honestly did not expect a single response, let alone four. Making me think I should work on it again, a quarter century later, lol. 

Thank you!  It’s very basic, and really just a proof of concept. It is, however, complete, and can be finished (by gaining the key to the gate out of Town).

Thank you so much!  It was intended to be “so much more” back when I designed and wrote it, a quarter century ago. Alas, it was already dated whwn I finished this proof of concept, and I never went on to make it what I envisioned, a procedurally generated first-person ASCII adventure game. 

Yes!  Actually last millennium. I used a DOS program called TheDraw to make the frames.