If you have never played this type of game before, here are a few essential tips that should help you get started!

Encounter was designed to be a game easy to learn, with a minimal amount of frustration. The idea was not to punish the player, but simply to have them learn and apply this knowledge until they finally succeed.

In particular, some of the elements you could find in some of the 80s and 90s adventure games are not present in Encounter, such as:

• Moving objects: In some games objects are randomly positioned at the start of each game, which is nice from a repayability point of view but also means you have to revisit the entire game map each time in order to know where the items are present. In Encounter the plastic bag is always on the market place, and whatever is found in the cabinet is always there as well.
  
  
• Changing map: Some games have a fixed set of generic locations (corridors, staircases, etc...) but the way they are connected to each other is procedurally generated, so similarly to moving objects it means you cannot learn the map of the game so you have to go through it on each new play session. In Encounter you always start by the Market Place from where you can reach the Dark Tunnel to the north or the Dirty Alley to the east.
  
  
• Illogical map: In some games there is no guarantee that going south after going north will bring you back to where you came from, which makes the drawing of maps extremely difficult. In Encounter the map is predictable and you can always go back to where you came from using the opposite movement.
  
  
• Unavoidable traps: In some games just going into a direction will make you fail because you fell into a trap, got killed by a goblin, crushed by a landslide, etc... without any way to guess that this will happen. In Encounter there are failure conditions, but if you read the descriptions, investigate things, look at images, or even use common sense, you should be able to avoid most of the traps¹
  
  
• Timed conditions: In Encounter you have only two hours to solve the mission, but that's the extent of the "real time"ness of the game. In some classic adventure games some characters move around the game independently of what you are doing², and some other games require that you be present at a specific place at a specific time so you can be a witness of some events³
  
  
• Illogical puzzles: Finding the solution of a puzzle in Encounter is not necessarily obvious, but after you have figured it out (either by trying things out or finding hints in the various notes and books you can read) you will generally find that they make sense. Some other games on the other hand are pushing the limits by requiring you do some chain of actions that make no real sense to the player even after they did it.
  

I will try my best to provide as much useful information without spoiling the adventure!

Since the locations in Encounter are logically laid-out and do not suffer from strange Bermuda Triangle syndrome, you can simply draw the map of the game one location at a time.

At the start of the game, the player is located on the Market Place:

The directional cross at the bottom of the image has two grayed out directions, indicating that it is not possible to go to the west or to the south, but we can go to the north towards the tunnel or to the east toward the street on the right.

As we can see, this matches the information we got from the hand drawn map shown at the start of the game.

At this point your first reflex should be to take a sheet of paper, a pen and an eraser, and start drawing a rectangle with two lines showing the possible directions, with "Market Place" as the title.

Since my hand writing is absolutely terrible, I will show the same thing using Trizbort⁴ instead, but the idea is the same and should look like this:

Then we continue in either direction and we repeat the process.

Let's go north toward the tunnel.

As a reminder, you can move in the game either by using the arrow keys to move in one of the 4 main directions (pressing two at the same time in diagonal to move up and down), or by using commands inputs such as N, S, E, W, U and D followed by "Enter" to go in the North, South, East, West direction or move Up and Down.

Here we can see that we can either go back to the Market Place using the south direction, or cross the tunnel to the north... so we add it to the map with one line going to the north.

Not very difficult, is it?

If you repeat this process over all the map, you will find which locations you have not yet explored by just looking at the dangling lines without boxes linked to them!

Before we continue with the map, we need to address the topic of items!

As the player you can have up to 8 items in your inventory (the black section at the bottom of the screen), and will find various items around that you can interact with, inspect, modify, take with you, etc...

Pressing the SHIFT key highlights the important elements.

Here we can see the player has a newspaper and a plan in their possessions - these will move with the player -, but there's also a bag and a car on the Market Place that the player can try to investigate or take with them (when possible).

A good practice is to add to the map all these items you find so you can go back to them later.

In Trizbort you can just use the "Objects" tab to add the objects you see at each location:

So anyway, if you keep going through the places not visited, add the items, consider using the options to color-code locations so they are easier to remember, you will start to have a better view of the world:

In addition to moving in all four cardinal directions, Encounter also allows you to move up and down in specific locations. From a mapping point of view this is not very different, you can just draw diagonal lines.

Here we can see that there is a small arrow indicating we can go down, allowing the player to go inside the unstable pit.

In the mapping tool we can just draw a diagonal line to represent this, but that's just a preference, you can do it the way you want!

Despite the map of Encounter is generally speaking self-consistent, you will probably encounter an issue when you enter the house where the victim is expected to be found.

The reason is simple: The house itself is a map of rooms inside the village which itself is a map of locations.

The way we handle that is simply by creating a second map (using a second sheet of paper) when we enter the house, and just point to it.

Here we can see that the "house" on the left side expands to another full map on the right side.

...and obviously if for some reason the house had more than one level, you could do the same thing and link the first floor level to the other levels on their own separate map as well.

Inside the medicine cabinet

In Encounter some of the objects may not be immediately visible!

If you see in the list of items anything that could possibly be open, maybe just try to investigate it and see if it's safe to try to open it, possibly this will contain other items who could help you in your mission.

There are also quite a few books, notes and other items with text and diagrams that could help you figure out important things regarding the story or where important things may be located.

So there you are, I hope these few tricks will help you solve the mystery!

And remember, you are a private investigator, not John Rambo on a rampage mission: Your main objective is to rescue a person in danger!