There is already a thread discussing where people got stuck…
…but I was curious about how they handled the fact of being stuck. 
I’ll be the first one to confess. Even if I wasn’t very stuck, I used an hint system, once. But I wanted only hints, not solutions.
What about you? Walkthoughs? Hint-systems? Help section on a forum? Playthrough videos? Just asked what to do to your wife/husband?
Would you deserve the ★★★ 100% Pure Adventure Gamer ★★★ badge?
Well. I did not deliberately use any hints or walk through but there was this one blog post about bugs and I was somewhat stuck at the moment it came out and tried to figure out whether I was affected by a bug or just stuck.
So reading through the bugs with only half an eye open I came across one piece of information that spoiled one puzzle a bit. I am not even sure which one, but I was a bit annoyed by that.
Discounting this one puzzle, this was my first adventure I played through without hints and I am pretty sure part of it was the notebook entries but also that the puzzles just made sense.
And my wife played a few parts with me and had some good ideas once or twice.
D.
I am very happy and proud to say that I finished Thimbleweed Park without any external help, except for that of my wife, whom was playing with me. No walkthroughs, no guides, and no spoilers.
This is a testament to Thimbleweed Park’s design, so thanks to the developers for that.
I did get stuck in two places, but my obsessive persistence let me follow through. I was convinced that I could finish the game without outside help, so I persevere, in spite of being very frustrated at times and almost desperate.
In the end, it paid off. I still wish those one or two puzzles would have been slightly different so as not to let me astray for almost a whole week, stuck, frustrated, and not having much fun at all; but the rest of the game made up for it.
(Except for the end, which I found a bit rushed and unsatisfying, but let’s not start that battle here.)
Thimbleweed Park is a great game, and it is designed to be played without guides or walkthroughs.
-dZ.The exact thing happened to me- I quickly scanned the bug thread to see if I had encountered one of the problems and accidentally (honest!) saw a puzzle spoiler. I’m a little disappointed I had a bit of outside help, but I’m not too upset about that.
Hmm… it seems that the bug post on the blog caused a few unintended casualties.
I didn’t come across anything in the game that seemed a bug to me, so I didn’t read that post on purpose. But I understand why people who experienced “weird things” wanted to check if they had encountered a bug.
I don’t know if it counts as “external help”, but I wasn’t all clear in two occasions.
I discussed progresses with a couple of friends and accidentally had a half-spoiler: I don’t even remember what I was trying to do, but it had to do with Ransome’s contest. I then remembered a friend of mine told me he made the contest in Part X with X = 2+the part I was in, so I understood it wasn’t necessary. I felt like I betrayed my goal of not having external help.
Another thing is when I was looking for the spell book. I said to a friend “now I’m going to search ALL books in Morena’s library and see if I find something suitable”, to which he responded “…”, and I thought “ok, maybe it is in plain sight and I just didn’t notice”, which it was.
Are you crazy? 
I knew I’d have to wait many years for another game like this. I would never even consider using a walkthough. I’d rather be stuck forever and never see the ending. (as in Zak MkKracken, where I’ve been stuck for 25 years)
I remember using a walkthrough for monkey 1 and 2, and I’ll regret it forever. I wasn’t going to do the same mistake 25 years later.
No walkthroughs for me - just chatting about the game with my wife, who played with me, and a little bit with my parents, who played on their own. It felt very classic.
I tried to avoid spoilers, and indeed I was not spoiled much in terms of detailed puzzle information - besides tiny parts of the Ransome flashback, which I had seen in one of the fan events earlier this year. (Back then I decided that it was ok for me to see a bit of this more isolated part of the game.)
However just by following the kickstarter, dev blog and twitter, I had plenty of information about this game. Although I skipped most really spoilery bits, I was also curious about the progress of the project: I had seen concept art and a couple of screenshots, heard chit-chat about some inventory items, general talking about locations so I knew that a factory, mansion, hotel, libraries, sewers, radio station etc did exist. I had seen the trading cards with most of the NPCs. I expected an uber-4th wall breaking plot twist once I had seen the teaser and thought the spooky b/w surveillance screen scenes are probably me playing the game. Indeed there was very little that caught me by surprise, and I felt spoilt by all the tiny bits of information which I had (deliberately) gathered during the last 2 years.
However I do not regret having consumed all this information during the dev phase either, I enjoyed following the devs a lot.
Ron once mentioned that access to new rooms are one of the rewarding things in an adventure game, and in that sense my whole previous knowledge flattened many of the probably rewarding experiences. In the old days, I had literally no clue at all about a game when I played it, neither I was exposed to reviews, adverts, screenshots, teaser texts etc. Sometimes I didn’t even know there would be another playable character. Imagine you didn’t know you could play Delores or Franklin, or that the library existed! I had very little of those satisfying surprise moments. Instead I had some of them before the release, kinda different but also cool. Do I still deserve the badge? I don’t know.
I had Rayes with the Bottle get stuck in the sewer near the start, so I literally couldn’t complete that puzzle. I checked a guide thinking I had gone mental, but it ended up being a bug, and the coin on the floor so you could buy one was patched in.
I think, other than that, the only time I checked a guide was when I literally didn’t notice an item or clickable part of the screen (I straight up missed the bathroom on the Quick-e-Mart). The game did a remarkable job of leading me, but I would love an option to see clickable areas.
I completed it on hard mode without any hints or walkthroughs – first adventure game where I’ve done that, and it is much more rewarding. It did, however, take me a LONG time to finish it.
What’s that? Exactly how long? Oh is that the doorbell…
I understand perfectly what you mean. Many people here followed the development blog and they were well aware that that prior knowledge could have affected the game experience. But it was our choice and I’m sure that most of us don’t regret it. I don’t, that’s for sure.
Still, I saw a video in which a quite famous Twitch streamer was completely flabbergasted by discovering that he had to watch the Kickstarter video, produced years before, to find how to proceed in the game.
His reaction was so strong (he started applauding the developers and said “That is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in gaming”) that for a moment I envied him and I wondered if I would have enjoyed the game even more without remembering perfectly the contents of the Kickstarter video.
Now, it’s possible that the reaction of this person was a bit exaggerated on purpose, just to please his fans, but my doubts about how things would have changed for me if I knew nothing of the game still remain.
I’ll leave here the link to the playthrough video, in case you want to see his reaction:
I think you deserve it.
You can press the TAB key, for that.
I was weak. It was 1:30 in the morning, and I had to take the kids to school the next morning at 7:30. I wanted sleep… I needed sleep… But I needed to get to the next puzzle more. I needed to see what was in the will.
I googled how to get the gooseberry pie. I didn’t think about going to the tube shop with Delores… Reyes was covering that area. It wasn’t even the hardest puzzle…
I am ashamed of myself, and deserve your scorn.
Signing autographs; 100 bucks.
As far as I know, there weren’t even any walkthroughs online yet when I played the game. I did write some myself though.
I got stuck in two areas where I finally resorted to seeking out a minimum of help online. One was due to the bug where you could not find the needed dime when one of characters got trapped in the sewer. I find out it was a bug, and was relieved.
The second was finding the lost page to Ransom’s joke book. In the animation where it blew away, I missed it got trapped close by. And so I didn’t even consider the trampoline as related. I looked online and saw ‘trampoline’ mentioned in context of the lost page, and stopped reading immediately. Finally I realized I could move the trampoline, and all was well again. I’m not really happy with myself for looking for a hint on that, so writing this up is a form of therapy.
I feel your pain, son. Don’t worry, we are all sinners… 
…and, anyway, the kickstarter of the next adventure game by Terrible Toybox could include as reward a certificate that will absolve you for using external help for Thimbleweed Park.
I also feel ashamed that I found out about this game a month after release; I could have supported/followed for YEARS.
I will certainly be throwing guilt money towards whatever contributor level is required for absolution. I’m Catholic… Very familiar with this process.
Starting the game I had the goal to let TP be the first ever adventure game in my life to complete without any external help, guide, forum, walkthrough, hintbook, whatsoever. There may be exceptions like very easy games (think of Yesterday, The Shivah, the Blackwell Series which are quite short and easy) where it wasn´t necessary either, but I mean adventure games which are mainly puzzle and not story-driven. And I started playing Adventure Games back in 1991 I think it was.
And yeah, it really worked, was tremendously satisfying, and took me about 33 hours.
I got really stuck
SPOILERS AHEAD
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at recovering the last page of the jokebook (until I had Delores stand next to Ransome)
at drying the bloodsample
at loading the battery
but with some thinking (even at night in bed), giving it a day or two time to sink in, and some try-everything-with-everything (not much really) I succeeded, and I even wrote an entire walkthrough for the game, just for fun - this really helped getting the logic between the puzzles and all the dependencies.
It was really fun, but also took some serious patience which is hard to keep in internet times… 
And I found TP to be quite challenging, but also quite logical and not as crazy and hard as some other games out there (including Monkey Island 2).
I am not sure if it counts as a hint, but I got stuck on how to the gloves to pick up the berries. I knew I needed something to pick them up (Delores says that) but I couldn’t find a way to move past that point. I then listed all NPC I could talk to and moved all characters in each location, having them to talk to a NPC. After quite some time I had Delores talk to Rikki and moved on. Technically is not looking for a hint, but I felt like I cheated a bit.
I was tempted once or twice (map and wrench) but I resisted and I am very glad I did. This makes TP the very first adventure I finished without using any hints. It feels good!