This Tenebris Somnia beginner guide covers the opening of the descent and the rules that decide whether you survive it: you start with 4 health points, healing and ammunition are deliberately scarce, and the first room already contains a fight.

The first ten minutes

  1. Leave the ground-floor lobby and take the elevator, letting it stop on Floor 3.
  2. Turn right into Apartment B and open it with the Apartment Key from your inventory.
  3. Pick up the Old Book on the living-room floor and read it. It records the projector code you need much later, and reading every page of it is required for one of the achievements.
  4. Go into the bathroom, pull back the bathtub curtain and take the Wrench. Equip it from the inventory before anything else.
  5. Expect a creature to enter the apartment after the first cutscene. The wrench takes three or four hits, so position well and hit it once, then again, rather than swinging at nothing.
  6. Break the lowest board on the bedroom window with the wrench. The sunlight coming through is what makes the compound that dissolves the red wax on the Study door.

Once that door is open, the descent continues floor by floor — Floor 2, Floor 1, the film school on Floor 0, Floor -1 and then Desiderium. The full route, with every key and canister in order, is in the full walkthrough.

Julia is down on the floor of a tiled bathroom while a red-clothed creature stands in the bathtub; a shower curtain hangs across the middle of the room, with a green cabinet, a sink under the window and a blue door on the right.
The apartment bathroom: the wrench is behind the bathtub curtain, and the first creature is in the tub.

The four health points in the Tenebris Somnia beginner guide

  • Julia has only 4 health points, so one hit costs a quarter of her bar and two bad hits are usually fatal.
  • A Lavendoleum bottle restores exactly one point of health, and some of them are hidden in star lockers. Drink one only when you are actually hurt — drinking at full health wastes it, and one achievement is literally asking you to do that.
  • The inventory has no size limit, so you can carry every gun, key, note and component at once. The scarcity is in the drops, not the bag: ammunition and healing are placed thinly on purpose.
  • The intended economy is that you will only ever have just enough health and just enough ammunition. A firearm round should solve a real problem rather than cover a mistake.
  • There is no dodge button. Running is the only evasive tool, and turning on the spot to dodge is a common mistake — move away from the swing instead.

How to solve a puzzle you are stuck on

A reliable method, in order:

  1. Walk up to the object and interact with it. From demo v0.4 onward you can only interact with an object if you are facing it.
  2. Read the item's description in the inventory. The missing component is usually named there.
  3. Open the inventory and combine the plausible items — the combination is done from the item description screen.
  4. Apply the result to the matching target, then read the new description.

Write the clues down. The Old Book, the wall writings and the diagram panels are all puzzle clues, and the Old Book also records the phone code and the elevator colour order for the current run. When the clues still do not add up, the puzzle hub lists every puzzle in the game and where each one shows up.

What to do when a fight starts

  • Equip the right tool before you enter the room. Swapping weapons happens from the inventory and is awkward to do in the middle of a fight.
  • Bait the enemy's swing, step out of its range, then answer with your own attack. A heavy weapon's longer wind-up is the window in which you are exposed, so reposition between swings rather than standing still and trading.
  • Never fight on the stairs.
  • Use a doorway as a reset: retreat, regain space, and decide whether the encounter is worth re-entering. Some fights can simply be bypassed while you look for another puzzle route.
  • Enemies respawn when you revisit rooms, and a corridor you walked through safely once can be dangerous later. Check the room again before committing to a fight you cannot afford. Which weapon to hold against which enemy is in the weapons guide.

Saving early

Saving happens at burning candles — the save flames placed through the building and the film school. There is no quick-save button, and a flame that has been used is gone for the rest of the run, so light one only when you are sure you can live without it. Your first save point is inside the Study on Floor 3, once you have opened the red wax seal. Every flame in the building, and the two that carry a deadline, are on the save points page.

The three puzzles that change every run

Three puzzles are randomized on every playthrough:

  • the pitch of the bottle in the pitcher at the bar,
  • the colour order that drives the elevator,
  • the route of the lead fly tiles on Floor 1.

Memorize the method for each one instead of an answer. Everything else in the game is fixed, so if a published solution does not match what is in front of you, the solution is stale rather than the game being different.