Firstly, a big shoutout to SushiViking and NukeHP. They put out a bunch of stuff on how to go about this game, and I lifted a lot of stuff from them. :P

More or less, I figured I'd make a guide about this subject, because even though it's all over the forums, I like being able to be lazy and absorb all the info from one place. So for those of you who're like me, this is for you!

Also, I would consider this a work in progress. Initially, it'll be just some general stuff about how to play this game fast, but I hope to eventually add some strategies for individual levels, and pretty pictures to help clarify it all. Until then, I hope that what I have helps you out!

Without further ado, the rest of the guide awaits.

So in Volgarr, there's a few tricks you can do, some of them are really useful, and some of them are just...... there. I'll let you decide for yourself which ones to implement and which ones to just leave by the wayside.

I'm going to call the first trick, "spear overloading"

What I mean by this, is that by abusing the way game buffers inputs, you can throw a couple spears very quickly along the same, or very close to the same height, depending on whether you do it from the air, or on the ground. You can perfrom it by throwing a spear, and towards the end of the spear throw animation, you throw another spear, and jump immediately afterwards. What happens is the game remembers that you wanted to throw a spear for a brief second, and will do so as soon as it can, and because jumping cancels the rest of the recovery on the first spear throw, it will spit out the second one immediately afterwards. Sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is.

The second one, I'm going to call "crouch sliding"

When you're walking forward, and you swing your sword, if you crouch in the middle of the swing, rather than stopping immediately like you normally do, the game will maintain some of your momentum, and shift you forward a bit. Not crazy usefull, but can save miniscule amounts of time. Also, because of the way the game checks sword hits, you can hit two different kinds of monsters doing this, provided that they haven't been hit by it while you were standing. I.E. you can hit a standing tall monster, and a small one at his feet by doing this.

The third, I'm going to call "Roll Jump Cancelling"

This is one of the big tricks to really crank out a speedrun of the game. To explain, rolling is the fastest kind of movement that you can perform in the game under your own power, but it comes with a long recovery. Fortunately, you can cancel roll into anything, and in this case, a jump. Effectively, you move a bit faster than your normal walking speed, and to make it even better, you can throw a spear right after jumping and right before landing, by buffering the spear into the action queue as your jumping, and right before landing. Essential for a run.

The fourth, I'm going to call "Roll Spear Cancelling"

This trick is also very important, and will probably save the most time of all the others. Essentially, it works the same as the jump cancel, except now instead, you throw a spear. Fortunately, spear also cancels into anything, so you just hit roll as soon as you have the spear out, and there you go! Roll spear cancelling. A couple notes, this is generally very unsafe compared to jump cancelling, because you're stuck where you are for a tad, so any enemy can nail you while you're standing there.

A couple important differences between spear cancels and jump cancels

• Without a helmet, spear cancelling is only marginally faster than jump cancelling, so it's typically a better idea to just jump cancel, due to it being safer, and easier.
  
• With a helmet, spear cancelling is significantly faster than any other form of movement in the game, so as soon as you get it, abuse it as much as possible!
  
• Because spear throws wont let you go off of a ledge, there are some situations where you can spear cancel without fear of flying off a ledge, provided you're careful with it.

And one last thing...

You want to avoid killing enemies in the air with your sword as much as possible. It causes a slight amount of lag, which if you're trying to crank out the fastest time possible, is very bad. Spear = your bestest friend, ever.

If you feel like something should be added to this guide, feel free to pester me about it! I hope to make this as complete as possible, so that anyone who wants to run this game can just take a stop here, and figure out everything he wants to know. So yeah, drop me a message or whatever if you feel like there's a gaping hole in this that needs to be filled.