TL;DR: play as long as you can without help, until you get frustrated. At that point, the recommended region order helps a lot without spoiling anything but region names. If you can't find the next region, the world map will tell you what direction to look in.
Rain World is a masterpiece — equal parts metroidvania, movement puzzler, immersive rat in Manhattan sim — but its strangeness makes it hard to appreciate. Some things that turned players and reviewers off were fixed in [patches](https://steamcommunity.com/games/312520/announcemen