save often. as much as i love this game, it does not love the player back and is ready to fuck them over at any given time. this most often ends in the game softlocking the player, giving them some sort of unkillable creature to chase them, or just deciding to throw something at them that ranges from being mildly inconvient/annoying to heavily affecting the gameplay for the rest of the game. even still, saving isn't always a reliable option. sometimes the game will decide to just corrupt your file instead and you have to start all over. so, when you get into the game, be fully prepared and ready for the gameplay to just hate you and be very, very clear with how much it hates you. it's ideal to not become attached to your save file because you could lose all of your progress at any moment.
whenever swampy collapses, be sure to do one of the three: pray, collect goblets, or eat meat. sometimes, the glyphs on the top of the screen tell you when swampy needs to eat (which we'll go into more detail later!) for whenever swampy isnt hungry, collecting more goblets or praying will help. if there arent any goblets around you right now, praying will still help and maybe even give you some meat and goblets! but be careful! though praying can help you, if you've done it several times it will eventually start destroying swampy's mental health and the game entirely. Stone Cows will appear, high-pitched buzzing triangles will flood the audio for the rest of the game, the glyphs will reflect swampy's declining mental health and start appearing ones that arent even in the guide book (mentioned more later), and the side text (narrated by GG's god, gobbo) will become corrupted with every action you do (eating can lead to it saying "Taste of tin desire More chewing", "hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger", "eatbones drinkblood eatmore"; sleeping can become "scream uncontrollably atGOBLET does not help GETGOBLETS FUCKER!!!", "UP AND ATEMCOWBOY!!!!!! WORLD IS HYOU OYSTER ;^)", "fallingGOBLET GOBLETSfalling falling GHOBLETSscreaming falling falling"; and praying turns to "You have broken the Goblet Grotto Users License! Please hold as stipulated while we replace all files in your computer with lists of Swears.", "NOMORE FOOLING AROUND COLLECTR GOBELTS COWGRRL ;^0", "DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT". gobbo loves to use variants of the ;^) emoticon i think thats cute).
there's also The Paragraphs! i'm not going to get into them right now because thats a LOOOOT of writing and im not even sure how to introduce them. essentially, in the manual that comes with your goblet grotto download, there's a list of paragraphs. at some points during the game it will ask you to visit some of these paragraphs and read them to get a better(?) understanding of your environment. some paragraphs lead into whole situations and scenarios that turn into swampy's death, though in-game it doesn't affect you at all. the paragraphs don't affect the gameplay at all and can be read just for fun, but i do encourage reading them at some point! it adds to the unusual experience of the whole game, most of them are also very funny!
ALSO since i mentioned praying earlier, in seemingly each area there are altars!
in these altars you pray. these are fairly useful though especially if you need goblets, since if you pray here youre given up to 3 goblets and, according to the game, gobbo being spawned on the block being surrounded.
as far as im aware, gobbo doesnt hurt swampy in any way. all it does is stand around and hang out, which is fine by me. ill occasionally say where the altars are in each area! they aren't exactly important, but goblet grotto hardly ever has reoccuring gameplay elements so i think it's interesting!