Realms of the Haunting/Game Mechanics and Glitches

General Notes About Running the Game

• note that there are several ways to perform the same actions in this game (all covered in the manual):
  • movement: arrow keys, keypad or mouse
    • keypad also has the HOME, END, PGUP and PGDN keys for tilting the view
    • mouse can be used for moving around, but also attacking; mouse view rotation sensitivity can be adjusted in the menu (it's faster to turn using the mouse than arrow keys)
  • attacking: CTRL or mouse left while already holding mouse right. There's also a way to move your hand left and right while holding a weapon but I don't know how I did that...
  • selecting weapons: 1-6 for equipping weapons from the first 6 slots of the guns inventory tab
  • the inventory: aside from pressing I you can also left-click the top left corner to enter the inventory. While inside it, 1-5 change tabs. ENTER selects an item and closes it.
  • Quicksave and Quickload: F9 and F10
  • RUN MODE toggle: manual mentions both CAPSLOCK and TILDE, for me (EU keyboard) only the key below ESCAPE works.
  • Quick reload: if you die, press SPACE to quickly load the last save

General Tricks

• While run mode is on, you move so fast you keep getting stuck on each stair. To counteract this you have to keep jumping as you ascend them.
• Some damaging floors only hurt you when you're not jumping.
• When you enter a Tower portal (or other teleporter), it preserves your direction.
• You should do the worm at all times when at all possible.

Enemies

• The lumbering melee-attack monsters that guard the latter parts of the Tower (some of which are dormant at first) seem to sometimes drop various healing vials. This happens after they've exploded into fire.
• The A.I. makes the monsters think they can attack you when they're directly below you.
• There is friendly fire between enemies (but no in-fighting).
• Sometimes enemies can fall off the paths criss-crossing the Tower.

Area-specific (but not category-specific) notes

• The imprisonment doesn't actually remove most of your items.
• 8-spoked place:
  • 7 switches puzzle: to get from the state where the lower path is open to the upper path being open, flip switches 2, 5 and 6. You have to wait a little bit before hitting the eye switch to get the right turret to shoot.
  • 5 switches puzzle: correct solution is to press the leftmost and top right switch and enter through the right side.
  • Shooting gallery: you don't (?) actually have to do this one to make the fire guy appear and the portal to be cleared.