While I’ve played many, many adventure games throughout my life, I usually have relied on hintbooks, walkthroughs, or the like to take them to completion. The most difficult adventure game of significant length I’ve ever beaten without hints is Peter Killworth’s Countdown to Doom (from 1982). I am still not sure if it was simply strong puzzle design (it does have some) or some other strange magic that led me to finish hint-free, but one of the things I did that was unusual for me is write a walkthrough while still mid-game. This was out of necessity; the entire game is on a timer and normal exploratory play would not be sufficient to win.
The act of doing so led me to think about every step; what could be optimized, what I might be missing.
If nothing else, on a game like Adventure II where I know how to do a lot (the original Adventure content) but none of the new stuff, making a walkthrough gives me something to do. (The optimizing might be necessary too — I don’t know how many turns I have before lamp power runs out.)
My current walkthrough progress
This is a walkthrough for personal tactical purposes. It’d be terrible for someone trying to understand what’s going on. For instance, I grab items from rooms without light on because I know what’s in there and I don’t need to waste a turn with the lamp on.
I’m using the building extensively as a “home base” not just because the treasures are supposed to go there, but also because the dwarves can swipe the non-treasure items so I only want to be holding what I’m actually using at the time.
Hopefully I’ll solve one of the new puzzles soon? If all else fails I can dive into the source code.
Renga in Blue 
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