If you're stuck trying to reach your first reincarnation, a tip: the third and fourth mythos upgrades give you a scaling bonus based on how many times you've transcended. Setting yourself to transcend every 0.1 seconds and letting that run for a few minutes will max out that bonus, which is a significant boost for doing something that you'd normally never think to do!
I'm feeling like upgrade chances are too rare, I've been going through with very few upgrades at all. There's plenty of stuff to spend money on anyway, but it's definitely odd that I can go through an entire world and not see a single blacksmith.
This is... frustrating. I made it past level -1 by, I /think/, killing all of the enemies, reviving one with the one-up, killing it again, and then killing myself... but when I ended up back at level -1 later, trying to retrace my steps didn't work. There's something very fiddly going on there. I also managed to get past level -2 without it being entirely clear what I'd actually done right. Those negative levels might be a little *too* obscure, honestly, or maybe their unlock conditions are really weird and precise.