You could have also learned how to edit the saves to give yourself the radio :) . A tall ask of an 8-year-old of course, but not beyond the realm of possibility. Funny you mention Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It, because that's kind of how I "beat" it. After about 6 years of on and off attempts that always died around the church, I got fed up and edited the physics constants to make the game significantly easier. Since I used my own skill to hack the game and not an outside patch, I consider that "beating" the game in a sense.
I am now thinking if you can pull off an adventure game where some puzzles require editing the save file. It would be pretty tricky to make it understandable to most people. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't put it past Deltarune to eventually have an easter egg that can only be reached from a save state, which is impossible to achieve through normal gameplay. I know it doesn't have one right now, because all the scripts have been examined in depth and nothing like that was found.
Some of them also had some cheat/debug commands you could get into. I know you could teleport to other screens, but I don't recall if you could use a command to get an item, particularly in PQ1. Or if there was a way to get back to the state you were in before that if you e.g. teleported to the station to pick up something and then tried to teleport back to the screen where you needed the item.
I remember I could not get the obscure nonsensical spells right in KQ3 but I could sort of skip past them to see most of the plot.
I would suggest, without spoilers, that you go play the original Doki Doki literature club right now.
I did, but found it somewhat boring. Yes, I did get to the stuff you're thinking about, but personally it felt too forced. The game was trying to present itself as breaking the fourth wall in a way that is impossible with something built on Ren'Py. That is, I would say DDLC tries too hard and ends up stretching my suspension of disbelief past its breaking point.
Also, past the weird bits, there isn't anything there. I have no reason to care for these characters. It feels like a vertical slice of a longer game, or a proof of concept.
DDLC has a really cool idea that should be tried again, in a way that remains consistent within its game world, with more character depth and a longer story.
For me, cracking open the data for some castle adventure ascii character game was one of the first steps to being a real programmer.
I think I spent more time figuring out how the character save files worked in the original Bard's Tale CRPG than actually playing the game; I certainly made more progress with doing so!
Was this on DOS? "ASCII castle adventure game" brings back memories!
wave wand
i remember using a hex editor to edit save games to give me more in game money. felt like a hacker in a movie :)