This game is totally absurd, in the best way possible. Read this mess if you want

Artstyle: try lowering your monitor's brightness and/or temporarily turning off grain to make it more palatable at first. It takes some getting used to but actually looks awesome and communicates to the player incredibly well. All traps are bright or dark red and normal enemies are blue. Enemies have high HP but lose a portion of max HP for each dismemberment, and their limbs gradually shift from blue to red when damaged (their corpses become entirely red). Most useful for big enemies to easily see which limbs should be obliterated next, and the more blue on your screen the worse off you are. Your weapon(s) turn red when correctly executing combos to give positive feedback. All in all I wouldn't recommend playing with the new realistic visuals, stick with the original sin.

Combos: being pretty bad at most fighting games, I dreaded the thought of trying to learn and constantly execute combos. However the simplicity here left me pleasantly surprised. You don't even have to hit enemies at all to fully execute any combo and the maximum time between moves is generous. Firstly I would recommend rebinding the kick to a mouse button or something comfortable as I didn't like it on spacebar. Also turn off auto combo, it messes with your own combos and attack sequences. Simply put, combos are built from four pieces. Attack (left mouse), Bash (Shift, also functions as a dash), Kick, and your class ability (R). While the attack portion often claims to require a whirlwind, thrust or other fancy move as long as you follow the combo sequence just a normal attack (left mouse click) will execute the attack the combo demands and allows continuing the sequence. Here I'll outline the basic moveset of the starting class (Gladiator). The strongest combo sequence is Ability - Attack - Bash - Attack - Attack. The last attack (recklessness) resets the ability cooldown allowing the combo to be repeated indefinitely for high continuous damage. However I frequently misclick or get staggered by and enemy, so if your ability is on cooldown and you can't continue the above combo roll right into the no ability combo chain. Simply Bash - Attack to trigger Slam, then Bash - Kick - Attack - Attack to trigger Heavy Metal > Batter (or vice versa). Repeat until you can or want to continue the ability combo.

This is getting long so onto

Skills & classes: instead of learning valuable skills in real life do so in this video game instead. This stuff is mostly intuitive to rougelike and rpg players anyhow. Get high luck stat and stack hot streak for fat crits, stack sin ward on paladin and parry all the time, stack icy veins on blizzard staff mage and mash buttons. One stack of deliverance is great and transcendence enables ability spamming, while hot feet makes for a surprisingly effective fire gun. Almost all skills cost a % of max mana from the equipment slot they are associated with that procs when the skill does. Wizard oil restores a portion of max mana to all equipment pieces, use it early and often. Sometimes stacking a skill to high level is good and other times alot of one offs are more helpful. Also in your character page as depicted below a green skill is one granted by your armor or weapon while a gold skill is passive and permanent for the rest of the run. Experiment as much as possible, the fundamentals of combos and dismemberment can carry a "bad" build pretty far. Speaking of, most classes share very similar combos and always have a no ability combo chain and an ability combo like the gladiator so it's typically quick and easy to grasp a new class once you get rolling. Try every class in the game, you'll be surprised how similar most of them are (monk is kinda weird but whatever). There's way too much to cover in a review (now a guide) so onto

Equipping your champion: Stats: HP (the number), Attack (increases all damage dealt), Defense (reduces all damage taken), Speed (increases movement AND attack speed), Luck (increases crit chance and rare item find chance). Generally alot of attack with a medium quanity of all other stats works well unless building around def scaling attacks or hot streak. Gear qualities: white (one stat), blue (two stats), orange (one stat, one skill level), purple (no stats, two skill levels), and pink (two stats, one skill level). Pink is generally the best quality, while white should be avoided. Orange and especially purple are great if the skill is something you want more of, while blue can be good as filler. Stats can high or low roll so a lower level piece often can be desirable, especially with high HP or attack. This is less true for weapons, as the base damage is determined solely by item level and type. Only your equipped weapon contributes it's stats and/or skill so no you can't use the other one as a statstick. Generally the rare and ultra-rare weapons are stronger than their lower rarity counterparts, though with drawbacks and exceptions (rapiers on duelist feel gimpy). Slow high damage weapons (namely the axe) tend to be easier to execute combos with but can be sluggish of course.

Now that i've gone into this rabbit hole onto

Clearing levels: familiar to Doom enjoyers, just run through levels murdering and looting everything like usual. Pressure plates must be pressed to open doors and usually summon enemies. Reach the blue portal at the end to win. Though don't forget about the "optional" parkour challenges through the red portals that yield good loot, or red statues that can purge the negative effects of your curses. Once you approach an area with a red and blue orb side by side (you'll learn to recognize it) make sure you've gotten all the loot in the previous areas and continue onto skill selection. Here you can pick one of three skills, or pay for new choices. You'll often find pink curse orbs here which give you a permanent item level and stat buff in exchange for a curse. Some are very lethal, others just suck to play with, and some are mostly inconsequential. You'll learn what curses to take or not, try them all. Though if you anticipate or know the location of a curse purge statue choose the worst one you can find and purge it for gains. Overexplaining this onto

Progression: You choose three of four levels in a run (dungeon, cave, forest, or vessel) in any order and an "optional" challenge after any of them from a central hub area. Here you can enjoy the relaxing homely music that makes me feel more attachment to Divino and Helena than I should, only to beat the ♥♥♥♥ out of them. Also gamble your life savings on crafting. Pretty nice place to chill honestly. You should probably set a budget for crafting though and spend most of your money on the skill upgrade and sin levels. Press T to open the "map" for the run, most notable here is Helena's quests and the available permanent rewards from stage clears. Every level has an A, B, and C variant which just makes it harder to scale with your character's power. Clear all level variants across any number of runs to get the most permanent rewards. After you clear the C variant and return, become as strong as you possibly can then dive into the MAW OF SIN. The entrance is near the pirate ship. This place sucks, don't fall into the hole in the middle of the arena and fight for your life. good luck, and enjoy the awesome scenery. Also don't forget parry exists