Divinum Tips for New Players: Juggles, Runes, & Where to Spend Your First Sanctite

Divinum shows up looking like a moody pixel-art metroidvania, all mossy ruins and dripping caves, and then it hands you a launcher and asks you to keep a soldier airborne while you rearrange him.

It has more in common with 2D character action games than with anything in the Hollow Knight family. That mismatch is where most new players get stuck.

You play as Fjør, defending a northern island from imperial invaders across forests, caves, catacombs and sacred ruins. Sigil Games put it out on August 28, 2026, and word of mouth has been good enough that a lot of people are hitting hour two right now and wondering why they keep dying to basic swordsmen.

Here is what I would tell my past self before starting. Most of it comes back to one idea: stop playing it like a hack and slash and start playing it like a juggle game.

Launch enemies, then keep them up there

The air juggle is not a flashy optional extra in Divinum. It is the damage loop the whole combat system is built to reward.

An enemy standing on the ground is an enemy taking swings at you. An enemy stuck in the air is doing nothing at all while you feed him a full string.

Uppercut is the skill to lean on hardest in your first hours, because it turns any neutral moment into a juggle opening. Get in the habit of opening fights with a launcher instead of a light attack and your survival rate climbs immediately.

Your dodge passes through enemies

When you dodge, you move through enemies rather than bouncing off them or eating the hit.

That changes everything about spacing. Most of us come in from games where the correct answer to an incoming attack is to back off, and here the correct answer is usually to go straight at it and come out the other side.

Dodging through a charging soldier leaves you behind him with a free window. Do that once and you will never retreat the same way again.

Blocking beats trading, and perfect block beats blocking

Early Divinum punishes greed harder than it punishes patience. Two enemies of the same type will out-damage you in a straight exchange every time, so defense is your damage engine, not your fallback.

A normal block absorbs the hit. A perfect block has a tighter window and fewer invincibility frames, and it opens a genuine counter that puts the fight back in your hands.

Your visual cue for going on the offensive is the stagger flash. When an enemy blinks, that is your invitation to launch, not to poke.

Fury is not a button you press

I burned a solid twenty minutes hunting for the Fury hotkey. It does not exist, and the developer has confirmed as much in the Steam discussions.

Fury skills cannot be activated directly. They give you a temporary passive bonus when the orange bar in the top right fills up, which happens through aggressive play.

So treat Fury as a reward for pressure rather than a panic button. Once you stop looking for the input, the whole system makes sense.

Where your first Sanctite should go

Sanctite is the currency, and it drops from enemies and from the crystal formations scattered through every area. Bigger crystals pay out more, so swing at all of them on your way past.

Trok the Trader is where it goes, and his early stock runs roughly: Hero Sacrament for 100, Manastone Shard for 200, Life Orb Shard for 300, individual runes from 200 to 400, and a Rune Slot for 720.

My advice is to grab a Hero Sacrament and put it straight into Dash: Quick Recovery, then save toward that Rune Slot. Running two runes instead of one is the biggest single jump in power available to you that early.

Runes take something away, so pick a lane

Divinum has around 25 runes, and they change how you fight rather than nudging numbers up by four percent. Most of them come with a real cost attached.

Ambition is the clearest example: it gives you an extra Heal, or roughly 30% more skill damage if you go without Heal entirely. That is a build decision, not a stat stick.

Intuition leans on dodge chance, Salvation keeps you alive longer, and Might, Aegis, Focus and Hatred each pull in their own direction. Commit to one identity and lean into it, because four half-finished ideas will get you killed in the catacombs.

Mana is your healing, not your spell budget

Here is the trap. Heal draws from the same mana pool as Incinerate, Fallstrike and Impale, so every fireball you throw for fun is a heal you do not have later.

Early on, keep at least one heal in reserve at all times. Skills are for openings and for enemies you cannot safely reach, not for chip damage.

You raise the ceiling with Manastone Shards, of which there are 19, and it takes two to bump your maximum mana. Life Orb Shards cap at 12 and raise your HP.

Both types are front-loaded, with a big chunk sitting in the opening stretch of the game. The rest are gated behind traversal abilities, which is why pushing forward when you feel underpowered usually works better than backtracking.

Glyphs do four jobs

Glyphs are your rest points, and they handle more than saving. You unlock skills there using Hero’s Sacraments, swap your rune loadout there, and once you have Glyph Link, fast travel between the ones you have restored.

Light every Glyph you find before exploring the wing around it. A restored Glyph turns a nasty dead end into a two-second trip later.

Hit the walls, then climb them

Wall climb reshapes the map the moment you get it, letting Fjør scale and jump off surfaces based on your movement direction. Ledges you wrote off an hour ago suddenly open up.

Breakable walls are everywhere and they are worth the paranoia. If a corridor dead-ends for no obvious reason, swing at it, because shard and Sanctite stashes hide behind exactly those spots.

Leave the Cursed Seals and Trials alone for now

Cursed Seals are enemy wave arenas with three difficulty tiers, paying out Sanctite, runes and Sacraments. They are also a fast way to lose a lot of progress if you walk in with a starter loadout.

Trials of Aspiration are the platforming side, split into Search with no time limit, Pursuit with a timer, and Breakthrough demanding something close to a perfect run for its Warden Marks.

All of it is optional and all of it stays available. Walking away from a Seal at hour three costs you nothing, so come back with two rune slots and a plan.

Klyssa the Deathspeaker is your first real exam

Your first proper boss checks every habit above. Klyssa teleports around the arena firing magic orbs, throws a charge with delayed damage that baits early dodges, and summons adds to split your attention.

Her signature move drops damaging pillars in lines across the floor, and the answer is to step into the safe gaps between them rather than trying to outrun the pattern. Deal with the summons quickly, because orbs plus adds is where this fight actually kills people.

Dodge through the charge, punish the recovery, and keep her honest. If you have been juggling and perfect blocking, she goes down faster than she looks.

When it clicks

There is a specific moment in Divinum, usually somewhere in the Slumbering Depths, where juggling stops feeling like a trick you are performing and starts feeling like the way you talk to the game. Enemies go up, you follow them, and the whole encounter turns into something you are composing instead of surviving.

Getting there takes a few hours of unlearning habits from other games, and I will be honest that the rune trade-offs and the difficulty spikes will not suit everyone. If you want a metroidvania you can drift through, the combat here is going to keep grabbing you by the collar.

If you want a game that rewards you for getting good at a specific, expressive thing, it is one of the more generous indies I have played this year. Start with the launcher, learn the dodge, and let Fury come to you.

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Images in this article are from the Divinum page on Steam and used under Fair Use.