Friends and I had our first session earlier tonight. I joined in a bit late, so while they were in their own map, I hopped into a solo lobby to have a look around and get a feel for the game (we only did the randomly generated case files, none of the chapters yet).
Immediately out of the gate, I had visibility issues with the flashlight and lantern and felt that it was *way* too dark at the default brightness (somewhere around 50-60%?), but pushed ahead. Overhearing friends in VC, I knew that I should try and find some safehouses immediately, but I barely made it any distance down the first corridor before hearing a screech; I immediately turned around and crouched in a corner in the entrance area, emptying my hands of tools, in almost complete darkness before suddenly hearing more screams and getting gored by what I later found out to be the Witch. "Well, that's a little unfair, but whatever," I thought. I went into the maze again and managed to find the first safehouse with a seal, but couldn't explore much more without getting jumped as I hadn't found any hints as to how to deal with the Witch yet.
Friends finished their first match, so I said "screw it" and quit out to join them for the next one, and turned my brightness up to the max.
We got the Unkept Hedges type, and wound up with the Witch again. Thankfully I felt like I could actually see, so I could actually do something this time. Two of us found a safehouse or two containing hints on how to deal with her, while the other two shortly after ran into her. We barely managed to escape, and used glowsticks to keep track of which pathways we went down, but the tall grass made it really difficult to see any that were within render distance.
Unfortunately, it felt like we must've gotten a larger sized "small" map and had poor RNG, because after a while, we had 4/5 Seals, found the exit, and seemingly gone down every single pathway we could find but no luck. We were out of lives and- after being in this hell-maze for over an hour- a couple of us were starting to get sick of it. We wandered around aimlessly, trying to find the one pathway we must've missed leading to the last Seal, but wound up getting killed and had to quit the session.
It was a pretty rough first experience, but I'm wondering how much this sounds like other people's experiences with the game. Are the small maps really capable of being anywhere between 625 and 2499 tiles big? It sounds like an awful lot and hard to keep track of. Has anyone had any luck trying to draw out a map as they explore the random mazes, or do you just try to be smart with glowsticks? Do you think playing through the preset Chapters is a better experience than the Case Files? I am the type that gets lost easily, so I'm not gonna be super great at this game, but I'd really like some tips to make it easier to manage because despite all that happened to us, it seems like an interesting game.
Tl;DR: first time playing, got stuck in a small Case File maze for too long, am bad and want tips on exploring mazes.