Got this game on Steam with large discount due to few other Lovecraft-inspired titles I had.

As you can all imagine, first many trials were complete disaster and didn't add any love to the game. With some luck I managed to get to Hastur and it's where I've been sitting for ages. Read a guide or two on community board, but it was something about best teams and few really good advice, about locked glyph and status effects. Suddenly, not expecting anything at all, went bit different direction and game became not only beatable but even enjoyable. Not like got that far, just to Cthulhu, but would like to share my experience.

First thing first, you can pick your team if you really know what you want. I've used random teams all the way, and, while complete garbage in some cases, they perform more or less based on what they can get their hands on during investigation. Even best team will fail miserably if you don't know what you do.

There is limited number of rooms/situations and you'd need to learn them if you want to play successfully. Your team members are seldom universalists, and sending them to wrong tasks is counter productive and get you busted.

USE ITEMS!!!! not just optional, but prebuff prior to any run. If you need to get 2 skulls, a scroll and a 3, doing so on your green glyphs only is such stretch of RNG that can be disregarded. With both yellow and red added, situation doesn't look rosy but at least you get bit better chance. If available use purple protection on glyphs you need multiple copies of, and reroll rest asap, since doing so later will have diminishing chances to succeed. Completing a task usually gives you sizable rewards, while failing not only strips anything useful but put you on path to downfall. Fail several times and it's hard to recover.

When you stay at the entrance and want to go, just see if there are special effects on some pins. Worst, which should be handled asap, are locked glyph. Can be red, yellow or green, albeit latter are rather rare at lower difficulties, at least. If you see lock icon on the left or moving color waves around pin on map, that's your goal. In most cases you can open your locked glyphs even while failing to do full objective. Well, sacrifices are expected in this game, at least rest of team will have easier time.

Second, you want to handle pins with midnight symbol. They are bad. Crap that happens at midnight is aggravated by those, so it's prudent to clean them if you can. Some are relatively easy, some are hard. At least, not having extra damage to any stats on your team if removed makes them high on my priority list.

Another bad thing is pin with outstretched hand. Normally, it's a monster that requires few glyphs to kill, and objective isn't completed unless both monster and original clues are finished. Again, killing monster might be the only option for rest of the team to succeed later on.

Outworld pins are sure way to move forward to your final objective, but I started to prioritize hindrances first just not being stuck with few possible ways to solve any situation.

Said all above, just try different rooms if you can't really clear some with a team lacking in such endeavor. With deadly pins removed, just pick whatever you fancy. Again, game knowledge help to some extent.

Last but not least, heal your team and use shop at the entrance when buttered. Extra action points earned during adventure allows you to heal both sanity and health, plus you can get useful things in gift shop, including win tokens. If your investigator is at 1 in hp or sanity, just go there and don't even try to go into any rooms.

Thanks for reading and hope it will help you start to enjoy this complex but very good game.