Well, your quite right. I was thinking about this problem and i have some solutions:
1- warning the player before using handle and blade (which if the player is lazy won't work well as the player won't try to play the game again)
2- adding more items which appear when player used handle and blade
3- changing the answer of the riddle so both "fishing rod-blade" and "crystal-rock" will work and changing the way to get the apple
However i was unwell today and didn't managed to work on the game