You move one square at a time, facing one direction, seeing only what your light reaches. There is no overhead view of the dungeon and no map you did not make yourself. What you know about a place is exactly what you have walked, bumped into, or written down.
Forward and back, turn left and right, and sidestep either way without changing which way you face — that last one matters more than it sounds, because what you are facing is what you can see.
Turning is free. So is walking into a wall. No time passes for either, so you can stand in one place and look at all four walls for as long as you like. Every actual step, though, costs a moment — and moments are what burn your torches and what give something down there another chance to find you.
The screen carries no list of controls, on purpose. Everything you can do is behind one key — Esc — which opens a menu that both tells you the keys and does the things. If you never learn that, the small [i] in the corner of the log opens the same menu with a click.
Two different things, and the difference is worth learning early.
The log is the running commentary on the parchment — what you just did, what you just found, who just burned out a torch. It scrolls past as you play and it is never saved. Nothing in it survives the session.
The journal is what you keep: the map of this place as you have drawn it by walking, plus any notes you choose to write. One journal per place, and it persists.
So a line in the log telling you something important is not a record. If you want it, write it down.
The corner map is heading-up: your marker is an arrow that always points up the screen and never moves, and the dungeon rotates underneath it as you turn. Forward is up. You can cycle how strongly it shows, or turn it off, if it is in the way.
This works because your party starts every dungeon with a sure sense of direction. It is not an item and you do not buy it — it is simply yours, until something takes it.
That sense of direction can be taken from you. When it goes, the minimap freezes where it last was: you turn, and the map no longer turns with you. Your marker stops being an arrow and becomes a plain circle, because it no longer knows which way you are pointing, and asking where you are gets you nothing at all.
Here is the part worth holding on to. The map you have drawn is still completely true. Nothing you recorded has been corrupted, moved, or redrawn wrong — the only thing wrong is which way the picture is currently pointing. Which means a careful player can reason their way back out of it, by noticing the angle a new corridor makes against one they already know.
Your bearings come back when you reach somewhere the party recognizes — the way you came in, or a staircase you are standing on. Not straight away, and not by wandering: unfamiliar corridors will not do it however many of them you walk. Get back to something you know and your bearings return on the spot, and the map swings round to match.
Open the journal and you get the whole map you have made of this place, large enough to read, and you can pan around it. You can only pan over what you know — the edges of the journal are the edges of your own knowledge, not the edges of the dungeon.
With your bearings, it is drawn the traditional way, north up the page, whichever direction you happen to be facing. Without them, it is drawn at the same frozen angle the minimap is stuck at, because that is honestly all you know.
You will find no coordinates on it anywhere. There is no grid reference to write down and no "you are at 12, 4" — the map is a picture of a place, not a spreadsheet of one.
Which is what the notes are for. Standing anywhere, you can write a note about the square you are on, and it stays on the journal at that spot for good. This is the game's answer to graph paper and the margin scribbles that went with it: the door here needs the iron key, came from the stair, do not go left.
If something moves you somewhere you did not walk to, the journal starts a new sheet. It has to. You do not know where you have landed, and drawing it onto the map you already have would mean inventing a connection nobody has walked. So you carry on mapping, on fresh paper, from wherever you now are.
The game will never work out that two sheets are the same place. That is deliberate. Recognizing a corridor you have already drawn is exactly the sort of thing a person is good at and an automatic map is not, so it is left to you.
When you do recognize it, the journal will let you put them together. Page through your sheets, pin down the one you trust, and the other comes loose in your hands — nudge it about, turn it, and when it sits right, join them. From then on the sheets are one map, notes and all.
And this is the other way home. Merging back onto the sheet you started with gives you your bearings back, because that first sheet is the one anchored to the place you walked in through. A party dropped somewhere strange has nothing nearby that they recognize — so putting the paper back together may be the only way to work out which way they are facing.
Some walls are not what they look like, and some secrets have to be found.
A false wall looks like a wall but is not; try to walk through it and you will, whether you noticed it was a false wall or not. But a hidden door is hidden, and it cannot be opened unless you discover it.
Searching a square takes a moment and is one roll for the entire party — the sharpest pair of eyes among you, looking on everybody's behalf, so it is worth having someone who can actually see. You may also simply notice something in passing without searching at all, but a glance is worse than a proper look.
You get one search per square. Come back later and you are told you have already been over this ground. There is no standing in a corridor trying again until the dice relent.
A locked door gives you a choice, and one of the options is worse than it looks.
If somebody in the party is carrying the right key, use it. Keys are never used up — the door opens and the key stays in the pack for the next one it fits.
Otherwise you can pick it, and you must name who tries. It is not the party's best attempt automatically, it is the person you choose, so this is a real decision about who in the party is actually any good with locks.
A failed pick is permanent. Not for today, not until you rest — that lock is ruined and nobody in the party will ever open it. You get one attempt with one character, and if you send the wrong one you have closed that door for good. Some locks cannot be picked at all, and will only ever answer to a key.
Stairs are how you leave, and the only way. Until your party takes them they are underground — that is a real state the game tracks, not a figure of speech, and it is why you cannot train, shop or heal from down there. The trip home is part of the expedition.
Stairs you have not yet found are not marked for you either. A staircase is a discovery like anything else.
And while you walk, things find you. Not only while you walk — standing still in a corridor deciding what to do is also time passing, and the dungeon counts it. There is no safe square to think on.