1. CONTROLS (only the important ones):
cursor keys: move forward/backward, turn left/right
<>: strafe left/right (,. on german keyboards)
A: jump
Z: crouch
~ (tilde)/CapsLock: Toggle run mode (note: The original key to toggle running is CapsLock, GOG team have probably remapped this to the tilde key because of problems how CapsLock is detected by the game and DOSBox)
RIGHT mouse button: look at things (when eye symbol visible in cursor), move forward/backward, turn left/right with mouse movements (no eye symbol visible in cursor)
LEFT mouse button: interact (when green indicator visible in cursor, blue means you are too far away), attack (when red indicator visible in cursor)
BOTH mouse buttons: look up/down/left/right with mouse movements (when no symbols/indicators visible)
CTRL: use weapon
I: inventory
1-6: toggle between fists and the first five weapons in your inventory
F3: toggle difficulty (the only change is when you interact with something that requires an item: on EASY, the correct item will be placed in your adventuring hand (green) and clicking one more time will use the item and solve the "puzzle", on NORMAL you must go to the inventory and drag and drop the item there yourself (and figure out the correct item in the first place, of course))
F9: Quicksave
F10: Quickload
0: toggle between 4 pixel doubling modes (if the game looks low-res to you, even when using 640*480 resolution maybe you accidentally pushed this)

2. HOW TO REMAP THE KEYS
Method 1: If you want a more modern control set you can use DOSBox to remap the Keys, here is how:
-Press CTRL+F1
-click on a key on the virtual keyboard i.e. "<", the EVENT of pressing this key is currently BOUND to the key "<" (note: this is "," on German keyboards)
-press ADD
-press the new key on your real keyboard you wish to BIND to this event, i.e. "A"
-now whenever you press A, you will strafe left, but A is also bound to A (of course) so you will always jump when strafing left, to stop this press the A key on the virtual keyboard and DELETE the current BIND of A
-continue to make you preferred control settings for this game
-press SAVE and the results will be saved in "mapper.txt" in the game directory, if you mess up and want to restart, you can simply delete this file

I bound it as follows:
up: W
<: A (comma instead of < on german keyboards)
down: X
>: D (dot instead of > on german keyboards)
A: C (remember to delete assignment of C or you'll mess up the gamma with each jump)
left: Q
right: E
CapsLock: Shift (I deleted the binding to tilde that was done by GOG team, but CapsLock should still not be set to CapsLock because it does not work correctly, just use any other key)

This control set allows me to move through the game like in a modern FPS as long as I keep both mouse buttons pressed. Unfortunately there is no way yet to rebind mouse buttons in DOSBox. So if I get tired of pressing the mouse buttons all the time I can easily move around with the Q/E buttons like the game originally was played (but the strafing buttons are now much more accessible)

Oh and naming savegames is now a bit more difficult thanks to the rebinding of A and C and CapsLock/Shift. If you want to avoid this I recommend binding the movement to the Keypad instead of WASD like I did (but then you may need to delete the bindings for some of the keypad keys since most of them already do something).

Method 2: An alternative way to remap the keys is described in the following thread (it also adds the difficulty selection from the american version, but there are some limits to which keys you can remap where and you will need to start a new game, since savegames are not compatible):
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/realms_of_the_haunting/patch_to_allow_changing_keybindings

Method 3: A possibility to put mouselook on a key:
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/realms_of_the_haunting/autohotkey_script_for_toggling_mouselook

3. GAMEPLAY TIPS
-the manual has a nice spoiler-free walkthrough of the first steps through the game
-how to combine items in the inventory: pick up item with left mouse button, place it over another item and click the right mouse button
-how to use the healing potions (green vials): use them on themselves (pick up with left, click on itself with right), equipping and removing equipped items works the same way (you will need this in Raquia)
-you cannot open the doors with glowing symbols on them, but the symbols may disappear
-there is a map for almost every area in the game, but you may find it at a completely different place, much earlier or even much later after visiting that area
-just pick up everything, there is no limit to your inventory
-look over, under and around things, there are items hidden everywhere (even really important ones)
-there is a sword in the library you can take, use it on the early enemies to save ammo, in fact the sword remains surprisingly useful throughout the game (especially against enemies that use only melee attacks) thanks to its good range, high attach frequency and its tendency to cancel enemy attacks, just walk backwards while attacking
-the strange mechanoid robots early in the game are immune to the sword, but surprisingly vulnerable to punching
-don't worry too much about preserving ammo, pretty soon you will get weapons with infinite ammo (always save and check that a newly found weapon indeed has infinite/recharging ammo, one very powerful weapon has only one single charge of twelve shots and it's easy to empty it by mistake); the pistol and shotgun remain relevant for the rest of the game, though, since the weapons with infinite ammo take some time to recharge, and you need a method to dish out damage while they do
-try to preserve your health, since the healing potions are finite (but again don't worry too much: you will find new ones in every new area, still, it's nice to have a little stock)
-the enemy AI is very basic and has lots of trouble crossing doorsteps and other barriers, so often you can cowardly kill enemies through a doorway, but since most enemies are pretty slow, it's often easily manageable (and much more fun) to engage them directly
-you don't HAVE to fight you can simply run past a LOT of the battles without receiving a scratch
-it seems you cannot swim, avoid falling in water
-do not quicksave on moving platforms, their position is not recorded in the savegame and you will fall down!
-there are a few rare places where you can save the game in an unwinnable situation (for example after picking up the sword instead of the dagger before meeting Belial or the various ways you can fail the Raquia challenge), so I suggest keeping separate savegames over time
-one of the best cutscenes in the game is easily missed: if you find a metal helmet, use it on itself...
-keep an eye on the "information" tab in your inventory (right of the documents), old ones change over the course of the story and new discussion topics are added all the time; it's really intriguing to listen to Adam and Rebecca speculating about things before they learn the actual truth in the course of the story, one of the best things about this game imho...

Yes, that's true. If there are multiple similar items that can be used the game just blindly picks the first one. But there are lots of cases where there is only one possible item. Perhaps I was being too generous when calling those instances "puzzles". :)

Awesome post! Thanks a lot!

Thank you for your post, it was a great help.

Vote 4 Sticky :)

I believe that it will also pick the correct key for you. Never played on any Adventure setting other than Easy, because digging through inventory for the right key is just tedious and adds nothing to my enjoyment. But I did get so used to it that the gem puzzle threw me the first time :) I only ever played the US version, and GOG's is apparently the UK version, but it seemed like you could use potions by directly right-clicking on them in your inventory.

You eventually get a weapon that can break some of the glowing seals by shooting at them. I can't remember now whether that weapon is an infinite recharge weapons that requires a full charge to break the seals, or if it has a fixed number of non-replaceable charges... (staff with an ankh head)

I don't remember which weapon has the single charge. It does kind of seem like the ankh staff had limited charges, and some of the rechargers recharge very slowly, but I just can't remember a single shot weapon... Wonder if the ankh was single shot in the UK...

Yes, the game is indeed not very consistent what it considers similar items and what not. I completely agree that turning the difficulty to normal adds not much to the game. Nope, right-clicking is "look at" and opens a detail view of items. You're right, I forgot about that. There is a staff that can destroy the red "Infinity" symbols on doors, but only those, if I remember correctly. This one recharges.

Spoiler warning:
About the single charge staff; I was talking about Florentine's Staff that you find under a bed. It's brown with a dark green gem at the top (it looks line an ankh, so we are probably talking about the same one). It has a single charge of twelve shots (so it shoots twelve times not once, I didn't make that very clear) and I strongly recommend saving it for the last boss. :)

I never knew about this feature of DOSbox! Immensely useful on a number of games I have...

Thanks!

I found a problem - for some reason I can't remap the Tilde key. More precisely, I can remap it, it shows up in the conf file as the same as the 'r' key (which I chose), but in the game it doesn't work - the Tilde does. As I have my screen capture tied to the Tilde key, I'm getting a lot of screen caps of ROTH while testing...

That's really odd.

The combination of the Tilde key and European keyboard layouts and the inconsistent way games access keyboard events (some use direct hardware access, some use the operating system abstraction, some use REALLY strange mixtures...) has always been a headache for me. AFAIK DOSBox uses the SDL keyboard events, but there r and ~ should definitely not be the SAME key.

Are you 100% sure tilde and r are the same keycode?

Ah, of course - US keyboard mapping. I'm forgetting what the key is CALLED - the Tilde is actually '~' - the kay that does running is '¬' - the one up by the No. 1. DOSbox won't map running to r for me, whichever I try and remap.

Incidentally, the manual is a bit confused, page 23 says run mode is Tilde (well, it's that key, but it's only the Tilde on a US keyboard), whereas page 7 says it's caps lock (which it isn't...) Is this the US manual, I wonder?

Ah, I see what you did there. You misunderstood how the remapping works (and it's indeed really confusing): you bound the r-key to the EVENT of the tilde key, that means every time you press the r-key (which is key 114), DOSBox currently sends an R AND a tilde, that's why a screenshot is made everytime you press R.

just delete the "key_grave "key 114" " line, go back to rhe CTRL-F1 menu, press the key on the virtual keyboard you wish the game to receive everytime you press R and ADD the r from your real keyboard to it.

By the way; You're from the UK? What are you doing up at this ungodly hour? :P

Edit:
The tilde key looks shopped in this version of the manual, I can tell by the pixels and seeing quite a few shops in my time. :P

I don't know who did that or why. On my keyboard the running key is Capslock, not tilde and I guess it is for you, too. It toggles running on/off, there is no "keep pressed to run" key in ROTH.

You seem to have read my original post, but then my edited version when I realised my error. However, to clarify - on my keyboard, it's the ¬ key that sets running mode (and sets off my screen capture, that's another one to delete...), the one to the left of the number 1. It works in the game. But it will not remap in DOSbox, despite being on the conf file list. Note that I have all the other movement keys remapped - WASD, plus Q & E to strafe, spacebar to jump, etc.

I remember US keys being a hassle back in the day - made it a bit of a puzzler naming installation directories in Terminator Future Shock, for one thing, the \ key was hidden somewhere...

Oh, and it's a couple hours less ungodly here than in Switzerland... although considering the game we're discussing, is that a suitable phrase?

Hmm, That's really odd, so CapsLock does not work for you for toggling run mode? For me, CapsLock is still bound to CapsLock and I can use it to toggle run mode, since you have a European keyboard I didn't expect yours to be so different:
key_capslock "key 301"

Well, the way I understand it there is a difference between the virtual keyboard DOSBox shows you and your physical keyboard. All we must now find out what SDL-name corresponds to this key, it seems it is NOT "key_grave". Try binding R to one of the keys LEFT of the number keys.

Edit: I just noticed that toggling run mode in ROTH is not very consistent for me, the game seems to ignore the keypress randomly and accept it other times. Seems related to how CapsLock works in Windows and how DOSBox reads it.

Got it! No real idea how though... my keymap must be screwed up royally now...

it seemed to me that run mode was supposed to be caps Lock, but was remapped to ` (which is in the place where a US tilde would be), so I deleted the remap of Run Mode, and then added a remap to r...

Well, something like that. Anyway, r gives me Run Mode now. And goodnight...