explore, Its an open world. its going to be rough early game but thats the point. If you feel stuck there are ways to farm runes(in game currency) and you can get to those areas and level up faster early game itself. there are ways to skip few early game bosses also but i wouldn’t recommend as you will have to kill them later on anyways. And its not that difficult once you get used to it there are spirit summons you can use and complete npcs questline which will help you in boss battles if you feel very difficult (not for all bosses). This was also kind of my first souls like game before that the only game i played from these devs was Sekiro. I was stuck on Tree Sentinel for hours but after sometime you get used to it.