Posted March 22, 2020 by Jonathan Hawkins
With more eyes on this page and downloads in the past few days than I've had in the entire year prior since the game released, this seems like an excellent time to put up a tips guide to help folks who might be confused or stuck at certain points in the game. It's something I've been meaning to do in some form or another for awhile now, but I think it would be most helpful to have now.
Getting stuck in a game and not knowing what to do is never a fun experience, and looking back on this project now in hindsight, there are a few parts that I would probably do a little differently if I had the chance to do them all over again. But that's a tale for another post.
In any case, below I'll present some tips that might help players who are having difficulty with certain parts of the game. There are going to be spoilers for certain aspects of the game, so I'd personally recommend you only use these tips when you are actually stuck in the game, but it's up to you to enjoy it how you'd like in your own way. I'd rather folks knew what to do to be able to continue playing than quit out of frustration.
So let's get started! Here are some useful tips and explanations in no particular order for progressing in Death? Preposterous!
There are 3 ways you can enter the mansion. 2 of them are tied to quests, but access to the characters necessary for these quests can be denied to a player depending on how the game has unfolded for them during their individual playthrough.
The one way that is always accessible is via the boat on the south docks. You'll often see the lady captain standing guard in front of the entrance to the boat, and when you speak to her she gives you a hint by saying she doesn't want stowaways on her boat. You may also find her walking outside Berta's Tavern, or at one of the tables inside of it, and she'll give you other certain hints and clues as well.
You don't even need to talk to her though to get access, you just have to keep checking the docks area until she isn't standing in the way of the boat, and then you can board it. Her appearance there is randomized, and not tied to her appearance in the other areas, so just keep checking the ship. You can simply leave the screen and come back in again right after that and it will re-trigger the randomization check.
The first time you access the mansion via the boat it will always transport you there. However subsequent attempts have a percent chance to transport you to other places on the island "by mistake" at random, so it is the least reliable way of accessing the mansion in that sense, but it is also always available to you even if other methods no longer are, so it is the most dependable in a way as well.
The other 2 ways to access the mansion are tied to completing Smith's quest, and Jack's quest also offers a potential way inside if you complete it. However, if either of these characters or the related characters necessary to complete their quests goes missing while still in progress, you'll not be able to open up their respective mansion paths. It is also possible that other quest lines might take priority, especially anything that involves Mindy, so you could temporarily lose access to certain quests until the higher priority ones are completed.
If you've completed Smith's or Jack's quests, in most cases you'll be able to use their paths to both enter and leave the mansion grounds as you please. However there is another way back out to the rest of the island on the far west side of the grounds, past the meadow, when you reach the cliff. This is a one-way exit that can be used at any time.
The short answer is most likely: you don't get them back. If an important character has gone missing during the time between visiting the afterlife and coming back, you've lost access to them for the rest of the playthrough and you just have to continue onward without their help. This is by design rather than a bug or similar.
On the other hand, if you weren't specifically told that they went missing, and you're looking for a character that was in one location and suddenly isn't there after you've gotten to know them a bit better, it's probably just that they've moved to another spot on the island besides their usual one. So check around different areas of the island and see if they might be hanging out someplace else.
This could happen at a variety of places potentially, but I'll explain some general tips and illustrate a few of the more likely spots people will be getting stuck on creature encounters, and how to navigate them.
First, with most encounters you want to start with observing the creature. Not only does this give you more information about it, but it often gives you clues about what to try. Sometimes you'll need to do this multiple times. In the Kitchen/Dining Room area for example, there is an encounter there which will be impossible to progress through if you neglect to observe multiple times, as this is what actually opens up the correct option you need to use.
Many of the game's creature encounters can be successfully navigated just by using your sense abilities in a specific way. Others will require the various Curiosities you find around the island in order to progress through them. Some, like the encounter in the Guest Quarters of the mansion for example, will require that you possess multiple specific Curiosities before they will proceed in the correct fashion.
Depending on how you've progressed through the mansion, some creature encounters may be impossible to complete until later on in the game, when you have more Curiosities at your disposal. The red blob creature in the Mansion Entrance area is one such example. And speaking of that red blob creature, sometimes you will even need to use Curiosities that normally serve a different purpose or function in ways you might not have expected in order to progress.
You can always experiment with your available Curiosities and see if any of them have any effect. Using Curiosities and Watching creatures are both "free" actions in the sense that they do not require any NRG to do, so you can use these repeatedly, and most of the time there will be no consequences for doing so. Most of the time.
Similarly, you can always choose to leave the encounter freely at any time and try again later if you don't think you have what you need yet to proceed. In fact, it might even be to your advantage to do so when you reach the Garden area...
Finally, worth noting here is if you happen to be far enough along to meet up with Trudy, and you manage to complete the favor she asks of you, she will be able to give you some hints for each creature that might also help tip you off to what exactly to try if you're stuck on a particular one.
There are two bad status effects in the game you can get: Heartburn, and Bleeding, and they function almost identically in sapping your Vitality away. They come about when you interact with certain creatures in ways that have undesirable results. It's also possible to exhaust your supply of NRG when experimenting with creature encounters, which makes it so you can't use any of your sense abilities until you regain some NRG, and it may not be immediately obvious what you can do to remedy these kinds of situations. Below are some of the ways that exist in the game to restore your character to full health again.
Most, but not all, playable characters have their own bed that they can sleep in, and this will restore full Vitality and NRG as well as removing status ailments, but it requires you to leave the mansion grounds and go back to their place of residence in most cases.
In addition to that option, there are Curiosities that can help remedy these status effects if you have acquired them. Some are guaranteed cures, while others might carry risks to using them, but their descriptions from the Curiosities menu should give you appropriate clues.
Another option might be to use creatures that have restorative effects as part of their encounter to counteract the damage done by the status effect, such as the creatures you can find in the Hedge Maze outside of the mansion, or the Kitchen/Dining Room area inside of it.
Similarly, for those who have explored around the mansion, you may find a place to rest within the mansion grounds that provides some degree of relief and restoration. Or for those who have thoroughly explored, it is possible to unlock a resting place inside the mansion itself that restores any character you are playing as to full vitality, NRG, and removes status effects, without having to go back outside or repeat specific encounters.
If you've met Digsby and decided to help him out, chances are good you'll have a few NaturalNRG drinks in your possession that you can use to restore NRG wherever you are too.
The guards are in a few places around the mansion, and if you get too close to them, they will spot you and it'll be trouble for sure. You're trespassing after all, and they don't like that much.
A few NPCs you meet around the mansion will give you hints about how to deal with them, especially the fellow hiding in the middle area of the Hedge Maze, but basically you just have to wait until they are not looking, and not get too close to them. The clue he gives you is their helmets are bulky, so their eyesight and hearing are not the best.
For the guards at the front door of the mansion, having their rather loud discussion, if you wait a little bit, they will turn towards each other for a few moments. That is your time to sneak by them while they are not looking.
For the guards that are walking along a routine path, it's just a matter of patience and timing as you move along with them but far enough away so you aren't noticed. If you can find any side areas to hide out in while they walk past, such as a side room or other hiding place, that will be your key to getting by them.
Others though are immobile and will not look away, so they give you no opportunity to sneak by, and they are best avoided entirely.
You can play as any of the special characters that you interact with in the game, but know that once you go forward with a character change, you can't go backwards again during that playthrough.
Basically how the game works is all this is triggered whenever you die in some way in the game. You're taken to the Afterlife area, and you're allowed to explore at your leisure, eventually needing to speak with Curiosity there to return to the island. Your choice at this time when you speak with her determines how the game proceeds for you.
If you choose to return to life, then you will continue playing as the character you already are, but as a result one of the significant characters will go missing. If, instead, you choose to stay in the Afterlife, you will change to playing as another character, as they will "carry the torch" so to speak, with the goal of confronting Malignaunsse. Each character has their own little backstory and motivation for wanting to confront him, and you can enjoy a unique final encounter dialog and ending sequence of events per character. Some, like Digsby, might even have other unexpected surprises compared to other characters you have played as.
This all has a very specific order to the progression of it for design purposes, so with your first death as Darling for example (not counting the introduction sequence) you will always either have Bennie go missing if you choose to return to life, or you will play as her instead if you choose to stay in the Afterlife. Depending on how each player chooses will result in a different experience from person to person and playthrough to playthrough. It is also possible to complete the game entirely without dying too, and that gives you a much different experience than a playthrough where half the cast went missing or stayed behind in the Afterlife.
The short version: The Basement. Look for well-disguised and even secret paths in there, and explore it fully.
The long version: There are two main events that need to be discovered by the player before they are able to complete the final confrontation with Malignaunsse. There are a few non-essential characters that sometimes appear around the mansion that give you hints about the strange happenings in the mansion's basement and rumors of secret passages to be discovered.
Both of the events you need to see are accessible via the Basement area, but they are located along different paths, so you'll likely need to make two trips down there, or at least do some backtracking. Two special Curiosities await, one at the end of each path, and when you have them both you'll be able to return to Malignaunsse and complete the game.
This was the only time in the game that I used a completely invisible passage that was required for the player to find, but I did include a not-so-subtle hint about airflow in a peculiar passage just before what seems to be a suspicious dead-end, to tip players off that this invisible passageway down in the basement exists.
Once you have discovered both of the mansion's secrets and obtained the two Curiosities, you can return to Malignaunsse and you will have more options available to you to choose from.
No, that would be asking a bit too much I think from even the biggest fans. Though that said, it probably is going to take you at least one time of playing through the game to better understand how everything works, so a second playthrough is likely necessary for most folks. Fortunately though, with the first playthrough probably taking most players somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 or 4 hours to complete the game, subsequent playthroughs once you understand how the game works can be done in much less time than that.
What I would recommend for folks looking to experience the most of the game's story they possibly can in a single playthrough across all the characters, is I would say play through as Darling all the way until right before the end without dying even once (aside from the mandatory death sequence in the game's intro), do every quest for the special characters that you can, become good friends with all of them so you get to see all their quest stories, and then save your game right before confronting Malignaunsse. At this point if you want to change characters, you simply die on purpose, and change to the character whose ending you wish to see using the method outlined earlier in this article. Going one at a time like this will not only allow you to see each playable character's introduction sequence, but it will also allow you to see each of their individual confrontations with Malignaunsse, as well as their unique ending sequences, without having to replay the game entirely as them all the way through each time.
Of course if you'd like to do it that way too, you are more than welcome to. It may be a short game, especially after the first playthrough, but there are a variety of ways to approach playing it, and at least some small incentive to doing so with different characters for those who wish to see everything the game has to offer.
It's poking fun at words like "Malignant" or "Malignancy" and specifically "Malignance" and during the intro, the line that makes fun of his name calling him "Malig-nonsense" gives you a pretty good idea of what I was going for there. "Malig" is pronounced as you would expect. The "naunsse" part is pronounced just like the "nons" portion of "nonsense" basically. Imagine some overly snooty, stuffy, hoity-toity well-to-do nobleman who is excessively insistent that you get the proper inflection and pronunciation of the "naunsse" part of his name just right, and you have more or less the amusing mental picture I had in mind when tweaking the word "Malignance" into a silly name for the game's antagonist.
Feel free to leave a comment here, or on the main game's page, and I'll be happy to help you through whatever part of the game is giving you trouble. It might help other folks too with something I've overlooked.