Valdis Story: Abyssal City

• Your stats actually matter, think a bit on where you're going to put those points. You can respec later on, but it costs items.

• Speaking of items: Never sell/use your last Rogue's Cowl. You'll need one later to buy the double jump ability, and there's a limited amount of them.

• Another item to look out for is Tamahagane: there's only ten of them in the game and they allow you to do extremely powerful stuff after defeating a certain optional boss - with all ten of them you can unlock another weapon, or they can be used to upgrade your weapons and armor, or gain extra levels over the cap.

• That one companion ability that grants you regeneration is extremely useful.

• Learn to love magic. The system feels a bit wonky at first (every magic rune adds four spells, you can have a total of four spells equipped and the combination of spells you have gives you stat bonuses based on light/dark affinity) but the most powerful combos and attacks are all done with spells.

• Backtrack. Explore. There's a ton of hidden stuff, including areas and bosses.

• You get rewarded more for doing bosses flawlessly, and by not S-ranking every fight you're nerfing yourself for when they catch up to the stat curve later on in the game

• Double jumping used to be tied to Thunder Magic, but it was later changed to be a craftable passive artifact. however, the devs forgot to rebalance the drop system and it uses items you only ever get limited copies of, so you can accidentally lock yourself out of everything that requires double jump if you don't put a few thieves' cowls on the side (without any indication in advance that they're limited items, or that you'll need them later).