Yes, darkness doesn’t magically make things disappear or strike your characters dumb. Think of it like this. Go to a room in your house at night and turn the lights off. You can still walk across the room with relative certainty, you know where all the doors and exits are, and you have a pretty good guess about where everything else is in relation to you. You can still talk to people, hear sounds, and reach out and touch things. Darkness in D&D is very similar to that, where your characters will still be able to hear and reason their way out of the darkness sphere. For example, if your characters are in a long hallway and have darkness cast upon them, they will still know to keep walking forward or backward. They might not know they will eventually break through the darkness, but they still understand where they are.