Hint System

"Just don't ask me how to escape this desert. I'm afraid we're both toast."

"Also found in the level lobbies, the information concealed behind these Wrinkly doors should be used as a last resort only. (Or as a first resort if you are a really poor player.)"

— Cranky Kong, Donkey Kong 64 manual.

Balancing the difficulty of puzzles in a videogame can be tricky. While other aspects of the game difficulty can be balanced by adjusting settings such as health and damage points, time limits, number of opponents and so on, with puzzles it's often a case that either you "get it" or you don't. Developers want to make sure that their games aren't too easy to be fun but they don't want players getting stuck on a puzzle and ending up having to choose between Unwinnable or Guide Dang It!.

So in order to include puzzles hard enough for the Hard Core while still giving all players a good chance of beating the game without resorting to a guide, the developer can include a Hint System. It can either give players a small nudge in the right direction or smack them upside the head with the board of knowledge and show them the full solution. Many systems will give progressively more helpful hints until the player catches on, so as to give as little help as they can and therefore preserve as much of the satisfaction of beating the puzzle as possible.

It should be noted that Fan Dumb in general loathes these- even though their purpose would seem to be to help casual players get through less-than-casual games, they will be attacked as automatically making a game far too easy. The fact that it's optional will not deter them.

There are a number of different forms a hint system can take:

• Hint on request: The player has control over when they receive hints, and so can choose to keep plugging away forever or give up immediately as they prefer.
• Hint for payment: Like the above, except the player doesn't get the hint for free, they have to pay some sort of in-game currency in return for help. (Real world currency for help is usually either a help-line or Bribing Your Way to Victory). Particularly annoying when the help you pay for is useless, although it is usually possible to use Save Scumming to buy the hint and then reload your game to get your money back.
• Hint on delay: The game has some sort of timer to track how long you're taking. Take too long and the game assumes that you're stuck and need a hint. Can come across as annoyingly pushy if the player is just spending time exploring or admiring the scenery.
• Hint on failure: If there is some way to fail at a puzzle other than just taking too long (often death) then after a certain number of failures the game starts handing out hints. Can be insulting to players, as much like Easy-Mode Mockery it's basically the game saying that it thinks you suck so much you need help.
• Hint on loading: Random hints that may appear on the loading screen, so as to kill you time while providing useful information. Can be pretty annoying if the loading is too quick, while there are no means to view them outside a loading screen. Some games collect all these hints, and urges you to collect them all.

The hints themselves might appear as text on the screen, your Exposition Fairy making a suggestion or some sort of visual clue such as a glow around the object you need next. Player Nudge is an one-time version of this.

Compare Strategy Guide and Lifelines, the equivalent in Game Shows.

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Video Game Examples:

Action Adventure

• Later The Legend of Zelda games have some sort of adviser reminding you where to go next.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Sahasrahla is good for a clue or two when Link gets stuck. Need help? Touch a special tile on the walls of dungeons and this guy is always there to help. You don't even need to be in the same world as him to do this!
  • Say what you will about the annoyance of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Navi, at least she'll point you in the right direction if you wander around enough.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and A Link to the Past both have a fortune teller who can provide hints for a fee, either on where to go next or where to find Heart Pieces.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and the 3DS remake of Ocarina of Time before it, both have the Sheikah Stone, who tells you how to do anything from completing sidequests to fighting bosses if you're having trouble with them.
  • Finally, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds has the same Fortune Teller as A Link to the Past, who offers useful-if-simple hints for a Rupee fee, and the much more helpful Hint Ghosts, which can only be seen if you wear the Hint Glasses and give direct clues in exchange for a Play Coin.
• Tomb Raider: Underworld has a Hint on request system, though it is of dubious benefit.
• In Ōkami, you can buy hints from the fortune teller about where to go next.
• An Untitled Story features a crystal ball that, for increasing price, will give you hints for finding hearts.
• DeathSpank uses collectible Fortune Cookies to unlock hints about how to progress with quests.
• The Video Game Remake of La-Mulana has Xelpud continually sending Lemeza hints by e-mail. Xelpud also lampshades this by complaining about video games that do this.
• The Speris Legacy has a cat who keeps turning up all over the game world, giving out hints for money.
• Star Fox Adventures: Talking to Slippy on the pause menu will give you a hint from him regarding where to go or what you have to do. This doesn't work when you're driving the Arwing in a flight mission, however, which also means you're on your own when facing Andross in outer space during the Final Boss battle.
• In Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order once Cal meets the explorer droid BD-1, he can give you hints in puzzle areas, but will only do so if you ask him, in order to preserve the challenge if desired.

Action Game

• Devil May Cry 5: Random gameplay tips for the current playable character are displayed on the side of a loading screen. Some of these are already covered by the tutorial sections, while others provide more advanced tricks and gimmicks. You can cycle through them by pressing left or right as the game loads.
• In the Xbox 360 installment of the Onechanbara series, death is met with a few tips which are apparently randomly generated, often having little to do with how you died or which stage you were playing.
• Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom would display hints in captions when the player died ("Whip the Thuggee guards!") or needed to make a decision ("Use the swing post at the back wall").
• The Matrix: Path of Neo has on-scren hints for difficult tasks and new moves, sometimes an Exposition Fairy gives a hint out.
• Hotline Miami has a random tip show up before each level, such as "You can shoot through some walls" or "Recklessness is rewarded." This gets an Interface Screw before the "Trauma" chapter, where you character wakes up from a coma; the "tips" showing up before this chapter include selections such as "You're all alone now" or "Stop breathing".

Adventure Game

• The DS remake of Broken Sword uses the on request variant, with more hints being available over time.
• Chicory: A Colorful Tale:
  • You can call home at phone booths in order to get some advice on what to do next from Pizza's mom. If that's not enough, you can then have her pass the phone to Pizza's dad, who shares step-by-step instructions. For instance, Mom might say "you need to go to this city", while Dad will say "you need to go two screens to the right, and this is how you do the puzzle that you find on that screen".
  • Talking to Beetroot has her state what area currently has the most undiscovered gifts, and how many are left there, though she doesn't outright state how to collect them.
• Cragne Manor:
  • Very early in the game, you can find an item almost mandatory to get your bearings: a coffee cup with clouds within that can divine whether the puzzle in any given room is currently solvable.
  • On a smaller scale, the room with Christabell lets you get hints. They're encrypted with a letter-shift cypher, but the game tells you what it is and gives it a way to solve it.
• The series Drawn has a system where if you get stuck you can click on the portrait of Franklin and he will give you hints. In the first game once you click for one hint you have to wait quite a while before you can click again; this waiting period is done away with in the sequel.
• Escape Simulator:
  • Each room has a button that gives you a picture of an important location or item when pressed. There's a timer before you can get the next hint.
  • The "Item Hints" option is enabled by default, and marks which items are actually useful, and which ones are just decorations.
• Hector: Badge of Carnage uses a hint system that first redirects the player to Hector's partner, Lambert, for some subtle hints. If the player asks for more details, the game will switch to the full-on hint system, which constantly insults the player.
• In I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, every character has a psych profile provided by AM that contains information about them as well as actual hints regarding what to do. Problem is, seeing that AM knows the characters so well is a hit on their sanity.
• In A Manor Of Speaking: Typing "hint" clues you in to what you have to do in the room. If you've already solved it, it tells you so and advises you to go somewhere else. Exaggerated with the flat-out "walkthrough" command; the game discourages this and makes you type a command praising the game's creator before you can read it. But if you do, it gives you a full list of inputs you can type to complete the game.
• Machinarium grants you puzzle-solving hints after playing a mini-game.
• Monkey Island:
  • The Special Edition of The Secret of Monkey Island has a built in hint system.
  • The Sierra hint line was mocked in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. On the jungle of Dinky Island, if Guybrush gets completely lost he will eventually find a pay phone hooked up to a tree, which he can call and ask for advice. The operator will sarcastically answer any inane questions and insult his inability to figure out the solution. If pressed, he will tell you how to get back where you started (just walk offscreen), but not how to solve the puzzle.
• The Multi Dimensional Thief includes a list of hints through Pophint that gives partial information, and subverts it with the "help" command. There's also a hint booklet and map promised to those who registered the game (at least with the second version.)
• Myst IV has a hint system which gives different levels of hints in case the player doesn't want to be completely spoiled. Level 1 usually gives you just the most basic idea of what the puzzle is about, level 2 gets more involved and can tell you where to find the clues you need, while level 3 is just a walkthrough of the puzzle. Notably, this actually effects the game to a minor degree. At some point you have to earn the blessing of a spirit guide to enter the Dream Land; the guide you get will be either water, air or fire, depending on how many hints you've used.
• Phantasmagoria lets you click on the Hintkeeper whenever you want, although he warns you that too many will spoil the game.
• Telltale Games' Sam & Max: Freelance Police games use the "hint on delay" variant. The hints aren't exactly straightforward, though. Dawdling can be fun.
  "There's gotta be a way to get a baby to sleep. Without the use of alcohol, that is."
  "It's very impolite of that jerk to bust in while we're ransacking his compartment. He could at least wait outside 'til we're through."
• Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People has a setting to change the frequency of hints. One of the episodes even requires you to have the hints set on "high" at one point for 100% Completion. Also, some of the Drive-Thru Whale's bizarre ramblings are actually cryptic hints. In "Strong Badia the Free", "Immolate your brother, please" indicates you need to burn the flag, constitution, and bill of rights of Strong Sad's country Bleak House in order to conquer it.
• The Tex Murphy games series has a hint guide built into the game itself. Each incremental hint cost a certain number of points (gained by solving puzzles) and the system was structured so that it was impossible to "look ahead". Meanwhile, Martian Memorandum has a "Help" option, which, when clicked, allows you to choose any object in the room (including ones you haven't found yet) and tells you exactly what you're supposed to do with it.
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit on NES, to get a hint on where to find a piece of Acme's will, you can give Jessica Rabbit a rose, or you can give Dolores a heart. Furthermore, you can find a 1-900 phone number on a table in the Ink & Paint Club; when the game was new, you could call the number and hear a recording of Jessica with various tips on how to progress in the game. Just don't call it now.
• In Yesterday you can ask for a hint if you are stuck.
• Zack & Wiki has a Hint on payment system, where the player buys hint coupons to be redeemed later.

First Person Shooter

• Metroid Prime has an optional hint system that prompts you with the next location to visit in order to progress.
• BioShock has an on demand hint system if you get stuck.
• Left 4 Dead and its sequels have tips that appear during the loading screen when moving onto the next level. VS mode also have tips for its game mode.
• Insurgency: Sandstorm has helpful tips on its loading screens such as a commander needing to be close to an observer to call in fire support, always play the objective, and eat chips with chopsticks to avoid getting your fingers greasy.

Fighting Game

• BlazBlue: Continuum Shift added a feature/skit series to the game called Help Me! Professor Kokonoe! as a Hint on Failure system. Should the player finish a character's story mode route on a Bad Ending^note Just the Bad Ending - the Gag Ending routes don't count the characters are brought to the Boundary (the in-game World of the Dead) so that Kokonoe can basically tell that character what they did wrong and give them clues on how to get their Golden Ending.

General

• Interactive Fiction games tend to have a "hint" or "help" command that can be used to get a clue on what to do next. The most common method is presenting a categorized list of questions, which gradually direct the player to the solution as they're revealed. In some cases, such as Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels, there may be fake hints included as either a joke or as a means to dampen spoilers.
• Sierra used to make a bundle off selling hints for its adventure games. There was a hint hotline you could call for a fee, and they sold hint books where the hints were written in invisible ink and you could reveal them with a special marker. Hints were given gradually, starting with subtle hints and progressing to an outright walkthrough solution. Later, the invisible ink was replaced with an obscuring grid of red lines, and you used a translucent red window to read them. To avoid spoiling the game with the questions alone, some of the questions would always be fake ones — and if you read the hints for a fake question, the hint book would mock you. This is parodied in Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers when at one point, in order to advance, Roger has to buy the Space Quest IV hint book in-game, which is styled exactly like Sierra's actual hint books, fake questions and all.
• Today there is uhs-hints.com, a website that hands out hints for popular games in the gradual manner, beginning with subtle hints and progressing to more obvious ones. They make money selling their offline UHS Reader software. (This system has been around since the early-mid-90s; they only more recently retooled their product as a website.)

Party Game

• Mario Party 7: Hints can be purchased in the Duty-Free Shop so they can be read later. They provide special tips for boards, minigames and other stuff.

Platform Game

• Afterimage: Once Ripe has settled in Resting Town, talking to him lets him mention a hint on where you should be going next. But due to the game's rather open nature for most biomes, it's possible for the player to have already explored (and cleared) that "next" biome before receiving the appropriate directional hint from Ripe.
• Donkey Kong:
  • Donkey Kong Country has this in the form of Cranky's Cabin. Cranky Kong will, in between grumblings on how much better games were back in his day, drop hints.
  • Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest: Cranky opens the Monkey Museum and his wife Wrinkly Kong runs the Kong Kollege, where players can pay for hints. While Cranky's tips are on finding Plot Coupons, Wrinkly's hints are more general, such as beating certain enemies.
  • Donkey Kong 64: The lobby areas preceding the game's worlds have each five wooden gates from which Wrinkly's ghost will pop out, giving a hint related to what one of the Kongs has to do to earn a Golden Banana (or in one case, defeat a boss).
• Sonic the Hedgehog usually has a supporting character do it on failure of after reaching a certain part of a stage or boss fight. There are also usually floating hint boxes around the level that can be touched in order for the player to get a hint or instruction on how to use a certain game mechanic relevant to the level. In the Sonic Adventure series there are hint monitors on the treasure hunting stages. Up to three hints can be used on a single emerald shard and they get more obvious with each hint.
• Nintendo's "Super Guide" feature, used in several games including New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Donkey Kong Country Returns, allows a player who has failed a level enough times to allow the game to run through the level- you can either let the game finish the whole thing or jump in the middle to try from a later point. In either case 100% Completion still requires you to do the whole thing with no help at some point. That said, Miyamoto himself has stated that while he loves using the feature in games, he has the same reaction many gamers have to seeing that box/screen pop up.
• Super Mario Galaxy has one secret star in every main galaxy. Thankfully, if you've done all three main missions without finding it, the game will show you which particular mission it can be found in (unless Luigi needs to be rescued. But then again, he'll send you a letter when that happens.). Also, some of the purple coin missions will provide some handy hints, such as one NPC in Sea Slide Galaxy informing you that (thankfully) no purple coins are placed underwater.
• Alia in the Mega Man X series gives hints about what to do next. Unfortunately, they were unskippable in the first game she was in (Mega Man X5), popping up while the player was in the middle of something to point out something incredibly obvious and forcing the player to stop, even if he was in the middle of jumping over instant-death spikes. Later games had her hints be optional.
• In Mischief Makers, if you shake the pink Clancer Ms. Hint, she will provide a hint in exchange for 10 Red Gems.
• Shantae:
  • Shantae: Risky's Revenge: When Sky can first be talked to, she mentions the hint system:
    When you're not sure what to do next, come talk to me, Bolo, or Uncle Mimic! You can find all three of us here in Scuttle Town. From now on, don't be afraid to ask for help!
  • Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: The bathhouse attendants serve as hint-givers, as noted in the first conversation with one to acquire the Sales Slip, at the end of which she notes that she gives FREE HINTs. And after beating the Tinkerslug, she starts really working:
    Would you like a hint? [Yes] [No]
    
    Shantae says Yes: [Cycles through available hints]
    Want another hint? Ask again!
    
    Shantae says No: Okay then, have a nice day.
• Super Mario Odyssey has three different methods of obtaining hints to moons: Hint Toad (pay 50 coins and the location of a moon will be marked on the map), Uncle amiibo (tap an amiibo figures and, five minutes later, the location of a moon will be marked on the map for free), and Talkatoo (gives you the titles of up to three moons at a time for free, which may help find them).
• The Legend of Zelda CD-i Remasters have a button you can press to display a message from Gwonam or Impa hinting at what items you might need or find in the current area you are in, or if there's anyone you should meet.

Puzzle Game

• The 7th Guest included a hint book in the library, which would give increasing hints to the current puzzle when read for the first and second time. The third time you read it, the puzzle is solved for you. (Which is a necessity for some of them...) On a similar note, its sequel, The 11th Hour, had Carl's GameBook that you could consult for hints or, in AI-opposing games, ask to make the next move.
• Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest and probably many other gem-matching games will indicate a possible match if you take too long to make a move.
• Sierra game series of Dr. Brain has you earn hint coins depending on how well you do on puzzles, though using these decreases your overall score and you can only use a set amount depending on the puzzle.
• Chip's Challenge: There are levels which include a yellow-colored Hint Tile. If Chip steps onto it, he'll receive a hint or advice related to the level's solution (in the first eight levels, the Tile teaches him the elements that will be present over the course of the game). Not all levels have a Hint Tile, so in many of them the player will have to figure out what to do on their own. In Chip's Challenge 2, there are levels with multiple Hint Tiles that each provide a distinct advice, something that wasn't possible in the first game due to technical reasons.
• Eras of Alchemy offers the "Hint for Payment" variety. The goal of the game is to recreate life on Earth by "alchemically combining" the traits of two animals to produce a viable third; for example, combining a Duck and a Beaver to get a Platypus, or a Rabbit and a Fox to produce a Fennec Fox. Successfully recreating creatures generates in-game currency that can be used to purchase hints about the "ancestors" of animals that have yet to be recreated. The hints include nigh-useless 50-coin "habitat" hints, 100-coin "trait" hints, and 150-coin hints that plainly reveal the identity of a creature's ancestor.
• Klax shows a HINT: on the objective screen before each wave.
• Professor Layton:
  • The games use the "hint on payment" system, using coins you find across the game world. Each puzzle has three progressively-better hints, each costing one coin each (the third game introduces Super Hints after these three which cost two coins and usually consist of solving half the puzzle for you).
  • The weekly download puzzles aren't connected to the hint coins, so they use a hint on request system instead. The daily puzzles on Miracle Mask and onward, however, offer no hints at all, and neither do the Old Save Bonus puzzles.
  • Sometimes, when the game notices that you're taking a while about figuring out a solution, it flashes the hints button in the corner of the screen.
• In Mummy Maze, you can choose to see the solution to a puzzle that's stumped you, but then you have to restart the game.
• Pretentious Game provides a sentence or two that gives a clue on how each puzzle can be solved.
• Scribblenauts Unlimited gives you up to three hints if you take too long to complete a portion of the starite puzzles.
• Squaredle:
  • As your score for a puzzle increases, there are three levels of perks to unlock: numbers that indicate how many words start with a given tile, number that indicate how many words include that tile, and hints that let you sort your missing words alphabetically and show some letters in them. The latter is also unlocked at 3 PM PST, 12 hours after the puzzle releases.
  • Each player has one word reveal per puzzle (more if you have Squaredle Squared), and finding the bonus word of the day earns you another.
• Sutte Hakkun offers both the "nudge the player" and "show the player" format of hints (the latter being outright titled as Solutions), which can be viewed an unlimited number of times. However, if you use a hint or solution as a means of clearing the stage the first time, you are slammed with punishments, including a score penalty (50% for normal hints, 100% for solutions) and a mark of shame on the stage select and file select screens. Because of the incredibly cryptic nature of unlocking the Solution mode (which also involves completing the game), the only way you would be penalized for using a solution would be for you to cheat the game by unlocking it early.
• The Talos Principle: Very downplayed. There are a grand total of three messengers you can find, each of whom can only help you once, and you have to solve a whole bunch of puzzles just to find them in the first place.
• The Talos Principle 2 takes a very different approach compared to the original game - there are digital "Prometheus Sparks" scattered around the various zones that allow you to bypass puzzles entirely (though they don't show you the solution), and they are much easier to find and acquire than the three Messengers in the original game, instead requiring either exploration and/or a bit of platforming. However, there's still only a limited supply of them, and while you can get back used sparks, the only way to actually do so is by actually solving the puzzle properly, encouraging the player to go back and try to solve previous puzzles they've bypassed if they run out of sparks.
• Uncle Albert's Adventures:
  • The games are filled with folded papers containing clues.
  • Depending of the game, Tom, Alberto or Chipikan can give hints if the player is stuck.

Roguelike

• NetHack has two sources of hints:
  • When you eat a fortune cookie, the message inside will be a minor hint. For a normal fortune cookie there's a 50% chance that the hint is true and 50% chance that the hint is a lie. There's a 100% chance of a lie from a cursed fortune cookie and 100% chance of the truth from a blessed fortune cookie.
  • Consulting the Oracle, a guaranteed NPC. A minor consultation, costing 50 gold pieces, is a true minor hint, the same as can be acquired from a fortune cookie. A major consultation gives a major hint, but that has a base cost of 500 gold pieces plus and additional 50 gold per Character Level.
• Scarab of Ra offers hints on request, but makes you confirm the request four times per hint.

Role Playing Game

• The Brief and Meaningless Adventure of Hero Man: After the player logs enough endings in their save file, an NPC will show up in the castle to provide hints for getting the remaining endings.
• EarthBound (1994) had a Recurring Traveller selling hints. This was less useful in the American release which came packaged with a Strategy Guide.
• Get a Game Over in Epic Battle Fantasy 2, and you'll get a hint for the current area/boss. A full list (alongside the enemy being referenced) is provided:
  Waves 1-4 (Kittens): "You got slaughtered by kittens? You suck!"
  Wave 5 (Kitten Kart): "Knock over the fort with fire and black death."
  Waves 6-7 (Red Bees/Spikey Moths): "Might wanna use high accuracy attacks, or just stun them."
  Wave 8 (Guardian): "Try and seal or stun Guardian to stop his healing."
  Waves 9-10 (Red/Blue Jellies): "Jellies are weak against ice btw."
  Waves 11-12 (Glacier/Rock Eaters): "Better kill turtles quick before they buff their defence."
  Wave 13 (Giga Golem): "Watch out for when the golem changes his weakness."
  Waves 14-15 (Rock Eaters): "Turtles have really low evade, so spam IceBerg or Soul Eater's Unleash."
  Wave 16 (Sandworm): "Brace for mass status effects! Sandworm is one of the few bosses that can be poisoned."
  Waves 17-18 (Spirits): "Might want to use Anarchy's Unleash to debuff these guys."
  Wave 19 (Zombie Hydra): "Make sure to kill the other head before it revives the first! Also, blinding them may help!"
  Waves 20-21 (Flybots): "Airstrike should help clear out these guys."
  Waves 22-23 (Valkyrie): "The lower the tank's health the faster the turrets respawn!"
• Light Fairytale: In the tips section of the main menu, Miyu the catgirl can give the player advice on how to progress the story.
• Paper Mario:
  • In Paper Mario 64, you can buy hints on where to go next, or where to find Star Pieces, badges, or upgrade blocks.
  • In The Thousand-Year Door, you can get hints for all of the above except upgrade blocks (since they were removed).
  • Super Paper Mario has only hints on where to go next.
  • Paper Mario: Color Splash has a Toad in a trashcan that you can talk to. He'll tell you what Thing you need to progress, as well as if you currently have it on your person.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: The Pokémon Center nurses can suggest destinations to visit if you aren’t sure where to go. The issue is that they simply point out the nearest story destination with zero regard for what you have and haven't done yet, making it likely that they'll suggest going somewhere that has significantly higher levels than what you have or can't be accessed at all due to lacking the proper abilities yet^note Such as facing the False Dragon Titan before you have access to the cover legend's swimming ability.
• In Tales of Destiny 2, during a Bad Future, you can pay a maid on the edge of town to tell you how to get to the next city. Helpful, since most cities you'd be used to seeing as landmarks no longer exist.
• In Tales of the Abyss, dying to a boss gives you the option of watching a skit between two of the party characters, in which they discuss potential strategies for winning on the next try.
• Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne allow players to be this for each other, by using a special item to write and rate messages from a template. These messages then become visible in other players' games. Though, there's nothing stopping them from putting down downright lies. You'd be hard-pressed to find any cliff or Bottomless Pit anywhere in these games without multiple messages next to it that say "try jumping".
• Mass Effect's pause screen displays a hint randomly selected from a pool of several. Mass Effect 2 relegates them to the loading screens instead.
• So uh, a spaceship crashed in my yard.:
  • As the HINTS.txt in the game's files, says, interacting with the spaceship serves that purpose, "FYI for in-game hints on each part to get, you can talk to Aria (press enter on the ship outside your house)". Interacting with the spaceship gets a description of "It's a mildly broken UFO." and then Aria says: "Want to know what parts I need? [Yes] [No]"
  • Speaking to the hologram of ARIA, immediately after it's possible to interact with her, gets:
    ARIA: You can use items by pressing A! For instance, find the access key and use it to open the gate to my right.
    Mark: I know how to get out of my own yard!
    ARIA: Did you really though?
    Mark: ... no
• In Turtle Head Unmasked, once more of the school can be explored, Emma can give Harriet hints on demand. When playing through Emma's story, Mason takes her place as the hint system.

Shoot Em Up

• Thwaite includes a system not unlike that of Klax. At the beginning of each of the first dozen waves, two lines of text are displayed for five seconds.
• Xenon 2 Megablast allows you to purchase advice at the store between zones. It ranges from being deliberately useless to telling you which of two mutually-exclusive builds you'll want to be playing in the next level.

Simulation

• In APICO, the various guidebooks give you hints on how to find new bee and butterfly species in their respective pages. Dr. Beenjamin can also give you hints on some bees, albeit begrudgingly.

Stealth Based Game

• In Hitman: Blood Money, you can buy "intel" for in-game money, but players will often kill the targets before they need the hints (they're usually tips on where you can hide or patterns the target/guards take).
• Metal Gear does it with Mission Control on request and occasionally on failure. For example, if you call the Colonel enough times when fighting Psycho Mantis he'll tell you the secret to beating him. If you fight for long enough the colonel will call you to give you the hint.

Text Adventures

• The common text-adventure game engines, AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit), Z-Machine, TADS, and so on, support a hint system to varying degrees. AGT permits a room-specific hint, Z-Machine has the hint command that opens a menu consisting of hints, etc.
• Colossal Cave: Spending enough time in certain areas will have the game offer a hint in exchange for points. Some versions of the game also boost the number of turns left in the lamp's batteries.
• Supernova 1987 costs 25 points per clue, and it's a static text specific to that room (which doesn't guarantee an actual hint.)

Visual Novel

• The Ace Attorney games have either the assistant or the player character giving vague hints if you press a certain part of a witness's testimony that is suspect, nudging you to look further into it. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice will have your assistant outright tell you what part of the testimony contains the contradiction if you keep fumbling about, but you still have to figure out on your own what piece of evidence to use.
• Fate/stay night has the "tiger dojo" scenes that you get when reaching a bad end. They usually (but not always) explain what went wrong and what you need to do in order to make it right, in varying degrees of specificity. Depending on what the mistake was, the player might even be scolded for making such a dumb error in the first place.
• Jake Hunter gives you your current character's train of thought if you make use of his or her Character Tic — Jake lights up a cigarette, Yulia fingers her hair, and Ken adjusts his glasses.
• If you turn on hints in one night, hot springs, you'll be given three hearts which help steer you towards the Golden Ending. Lose one heart due to an incorrect choice, and you'll be taken to a different ending until you lose all three, which instantly ends the game.
• The games of the Yarudora series use a "hint upon failure" system. It varies slightly depending on the games:
  • In Double Cast, those hints appear not only upon getting a Bad Ending, but also on every Normal and Good Endings but Good End 1 (thus effectively making Good End 1 the game's Golden Ending). The characters giving the hints in the regular route are the resident Large Hams Gouda and Hanazono, while the hints on the Normal Endings of the side-story route are given by Futamura, Haruka, Shoko and/or Mitsuki. The hints they give are overall vague, often telling that you need to be closer to Mitsuki, or that cooperation is crucial to solve the mystery.
  • In the other Yarudora games, the Hint Screen appears only on Bad Endings. They're given by the character of focus of the bad ending you get (for example, in Kisetsu o Dakishimete, Bad Endings involving the Sexy Lady will net you hints given by the Sexy Lady; on in Sampaguita, Bad Endings involving Yakuza will have the Yakuza who killed you commenting on your failure). Clarity of the hints vary here: they're rather vague in Sampaguita, but much clearer in Kisetsu o Dakishimete.

Non-Video Game Examples:

Literature

• The Time Machine gamebook series. The last page in each book contains hints that help you in choosing the right path on some pages.

Tabletop Games

• Exit The Game has three Help Cards for each puzzle, with the first two giving general and more specific hints while the third gives the solution. Players are ranked at the end for how long it took to finish, but penalized based on how many Help Cards are used- however, the rules note that if a Help Card tells you nothing that you hadn't already figured out, it doesn't count against you.

Pinball

Tables with voice overs will generally have an announcer of some kind that lets you know what is going on and sometimes even which targets to hit. Since players generally don't get to read the manual, if the manual even explains the rules at all, this is helpful for anyone who haven't figured out every single rule yet.

Tables often have a display that will show status (and cover for any malfunctioning hardware). And when all else fails, look for a blinking light on the table. 99 % of the time, that's a good spot to shoot.

• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines has Arnold Schwarzenegger (as the T-850 Terminator) tell you what targets to shoot for at the start of each ball for maximum points.

Real Life

• The various real-world Room Escape Games will usually allow a player to ask for a hint by simply asking, upon which an employee monitoring the room will respond via loudspeaker with a clue related to your current progress. Limitations on the system vary by the specific venue; some establishments may place a limit on how many hints you can get in a single session (such as 3), others may penalize you by reducing your time limit, and others still may do both. More generous venues may allow players to ask for unlimited hints without penalty (although doing so repeatedly would likely not be fun for anyone involved).

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