First off, my apologies for the late reply. I had submitted this game completely on a lark after reading a Reddit post and simply forgot all about it! As for the riddles, no, there are no hints, sorry. I can spoil them for you if you wish. The locked doors are the locations of the subsequent Oracles, each of offering the next riddle in a fixed order. The search function only actually does anything after all the riddles have been solved.
In short, it’s an unsatisfactory game because it’s incomplete. It was a proof of concept work that I finished just in time for ASCII art’s funeral, lol. I had planned on making it procedurally generated, or at least I believed at the time I could pull it off. As it was, I hand-crafted each and every frame (over 400, IIRC) using an old ASCII art drawing program called TheDraw.
Anyway, thanks seriously for your interest and play test! I honestly did not expect a single response, let alone four. Making me think I should work on it again, a quarter century later, lol.