Haunted Dorm beginner's guide - Top tips to dreaming your nightmares away

As mentioned above, Haunted Dorm is a mashup of survival horror and tower defence. You play as one of the residents of, well, a haunted dorm. Your job is to survive the night and the dream stalker that is hunting you and your fellow residents down.

Each match starts off with you picking a room, heading to bed, and slowly upgrading its defences as you slumber. That means strengthening the door, improving the bed from a mouldy cot to a fortress of dreams, and of course dropping down some turrets and other defences.

The dream hunter will attempt to break down the door and get to your player, eliminating them. Your main defence is to keep the door unbroken and to wear down their health until they either flee or end up dying to your defences. Just remember that as the levels go on, the dream hunter slowly grows stronger, and has their own distinct skills that can make them more powerful.

There are a variety of different emplacements you can build, ranging from turrets (naturally) to door upgrades and even higher-tier buildings such as mines or watchtowers. You'll make use of two key currencies for those: gold and energy (or 'lightning' as it's called). Higher-tier upgrades require a combination of both currencies, and ensuring you have enough of both is key to success.

At its core, Haunted Dorm is all about staying below notice until your defences are in place. Pick a room that's out of the way of the centre of the map (those with a thin hallway leading to the door are ideal) and focus mainly on building up your resource-gathering stations early on. The screenshots in this Haunted Dorm beginner's guide are all from the same match, so they should give a clear indicator of how to progress.

Remember, turrets will let the dream hunter know you're in residence. So you want them to ideally go after other players before they realise where you are. The long hallway to your room will let you place multiple turrets that can attack the dream hunter at once, as well as adding just that extra bit of distance which they need to travel.

I'm no expert, mind you, but I found that a great setup is to find a room with the freezer (or whatever it's called), which slows a dream hunter's attacks. From there, simply upgrade your door and bed back and forth as you'll ideally be out of the way enough to fall beneath their notice.

After that, you'll want to mainly pursue getting a video game console (which accrues lightning) and add two repair benches. Combined with a freezer, the repair benches will essentially outpace the hunter's damage to your door.

But why no turrets, you may ask? Well, turrets can be placed whenever, and most of their tiers are quite cheap. So you can easily place a bunch of them at once if you have enough cash, and upgrade them too! That's a lot easier to do once you have a good bed and plenty of coin income.

That's what worked for me, at least. Just remember, your main objective is to keep safe until you acquire enough resources. Only then should you start worrying about eliminating the hunter. One top tip though, if you find they keep running off before you get that final blow, then invest in a lightning net to keep them in place!

This is a bit of a janky entry in the indie horror genre. But at the same time, despite issues with the UI and a bit of translation error, I found it to be surprisingly quite fun and engaging. So it might be worth a look if you like a mix of mild horror and tower defence.

If you're looking for more traditional but no less terrifying options on mobile, why not check out our list of the best horror games on Android?

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Haunted Dorm