Can you post a video of an “average” play for you?

Try watching a full run on YouTube. Always learn from your deaths.

Are you completing the ghost quest?

Always take armor and upgrade it, that will at least take you past prison.

A good strategy is to go mage, get to the wandmaker and do his quest. Then you can upgrade the wand he gives you for a guaranteed good weapon after you imbue in your staff.

Bless your ankhs. Don’t fight more than one enemy at a time. If you have bad armor try not to fight at all.

By the time you get +10 staff and +6 scale or plate armor you can just win easy.

Edit: also don’t blame RNG, with 0 challenges this game is 100% beatable every time. Try to get better!

You can use warrior strategy to cheese a win.

Play until you get a good enough armor from the ghost. For example +1 scale.

You would need 2 scrolls of upgrade to get it to +3 which lowers strength requirement to 14.

Then use a exotic strength potion on the armor to lower the requirement to 12 strength.

You should be able to wear it after find one more strength potion in the prison, so use all your resources to survive until you find it. (Health pots, ankhs, scrolls, …)

After you get 12 strength you now have a +3 scale in prison and are effectively unkillable. Just avoid zaps from DM-100s.

Use stylus to get good glyph on armor and get the talent that allows you to protect the glyph using you seal. Just remove the seal before upgrading the armor then put it back on.

Keep dumping every scroll of upgrade into the armor and augment for defense. Go gladiator and use slam for big damage.

With this build you will take zero damage from everything except later magic damage enemies so just avoid them.

This becomes even easier if you get like a +3 plate from ghost.

Edit: you can even do this with a +0 mail or scale. Leather is also doable but harder. If you get +2 leather from ghost you will be strong in prison so try to find a scale or plate armor to carry you through the rest of the game.

There’s have been some years since I don’t play the game (started to bike instead of taking the metro) but I remember that the thing that switched from hundreds of games losing to winning one each 10 or so games was using all the available resources: potions, seeds, scrolls, throw weapons. Everything can give you a help little help, until you are strong enough. Also, saving the maps scrolls to skip past the last levels directly to the final boss was fundamental.

Maybe watch some VODs on Twitch. I used to watch some streams by an account that I think was named just “Shattered Pixel Dungeon”, and he was very good about it explaining his thought process as he played. I learned a lot of advanced tricks.

But he tended to talk about more of the super advanced tactics with challenges enabled more than the basics. Just watching and paying attention to a stream can help with the basics, though. Especially if the streamer is live and you can ask questions.

Surprise attacks can be performed in many ways, and using them for guaranteed hits is an excellent strategy. You know those tiny rooms with a column in the middle that’s only 1 by 1 tile? Those are surprise attack factories. You can also get enemies to stop following that way if you’re in serious trouble. I’ll discuss both of these things below.

Here’s how movement and surprise attacks work. You move, then all enemies move (or attack). The enemies only seem move the instant you move, but there is a moment of time between your movement and theirs. If, during that moment, they can’t see you, then your next attack will be a surprise attack.

So, here’s what you do:

1. Let an enemy get near you while you’re next to one of those single-tile columns. (Orthogonally agacent to the column, not diagonally. The enemy must also orthogonal to the column and diagonal from you.)
2. Step to the side of the column away from the enemy and it will follow you around the column.
3. Attack.

Since you moved first, for a split second the enemy couldn’t see you because you were behind the column, so your attack counts as a surprise attack and can’t miss.

Instead of attacking, if you just walk around the column another couple of times, you will briefly see the “?” thought bubble appear above the enemy. At that point they’ve lost track of you and won’t follow you. Next turn they will walk in a random direction, so you can now walk directly away from the column to get some distance. Sometimes you get lucky and they walk the other way and don’t immediately see you again. You can also just wait behind the column and see which way they go and repeat this trick until you get lucky and they walk directly away.

I use the above trick sometimes to get away from enemies when I am very near death and I can hope to kill that enemy with ranged weapons or something, or when I accidentally aggro an animated statue by mis-tapping the search icon when trying to inspect the statue to see what his weapon is, and I end up walking right up to it and punching it. 😅

More often I just use the guaranteed hits to kill the enemy while taking less damage. Of course, you have to balance this with food. You don’t want to kite every enemy to one of these columns because you’ll use up too much food in the process.

Doors work the same way, as I’m sure you know. When you walk through a door, you close it behind you, and in that instant the enemy on your tail can’t see you, so when they open it, you get a surprise attack. In some cases, I’ll walk through 2 or 3 doors when fighting the same enemy to get the guaranteed hits. Sometimes this backfires, though, when you end up in a narrow hallway with a second enemy in the way.

There are dozens of little tricks like this in the game that make it beatable. You mostly learn them by playing and experimenting, but you can also learn them by watching streamers.

One thing I’d add to all the good advice here: positioning is crucial. You should avoid facing more than one mob at a time. Use doors to your advantage: when a mob enters a door square, you will surprise it and get a guaranteed hit. Use hallways to force mobs to get to you one at a time. Be careful when you’re in an open, large room, since a ranged mob can kill you very quickly.

Choke points? It’s hard to say without seeing a replay or something.

Make sure you don’t put on armour or weapons you aren’t strong enough to hold

I play shattered and beat the thing at the bottom twice. For some reason I thought scrolls of passage would let me go back up easily but nope. I play mage and usually clean up very easily even with just the base wand by spamming upgrades.

The strategy that seems to work best for me is to save identification scrolls and upgrade them at alchemy pots to more quickly reveal scrolls/potions/rings. You can “soft” identify weapons and armor if you have a decurse handy by just equipping them.

For armor if you get a fractional turn wheel you know it’s too heavy, for weapons do a quick check if you can surprise attack with it.

First upgrade on a warrior should be your starting armor. First upgrade on a mage should be your staff.

Huntress and Duelist are just much stronger at early levels anyway so save them for something good.

One thing that tripped me up for a long time is that skeletons do a last hit as an aoe when they die. I’m not certain but it seems to always hit, so only armor mitigates it. That’s the biggest source of sustained incoming damage in prison, having a method to avoid that saves tons of healing.

First of all, what version are you playing? Shattered, yapd, vanilla, something else? Many of the comments seem to assume you play shattered.