I was a little frustrated when looking for guides or general tips so I started to take some notes while I played, and pull together information I was able to find online. These general tips are compiled from several sources including Steam Forums (http://steamcommunity.com/app/263560/discussions/0/540731690512326189/), Ultrarunaway Forums (http://www.ultrarunaway.com/forums.html#/paper-sorcerer-discussion/), in-game guide, and personal experience. Check each of these places for more specific or detailed information on a particular topic. Steam is especially helpful if you get stuck on any of the puzzles or bosses or get some opinions on minions and party composition.

The tips below are mostly intended for the beginning player, without, I am hoping, giving away too much information. Please let me know if you have any other information to add, or you want to see.

Boss Fights - there is a boss fight at the end of each level (you can tell how far I have progressed :)).
1. Knight
2. Decimator
3. Myles the Illusionist
4. Berias the Hex Knight
5. Ricerche the Ranger

Minions - You will receive 6 minions or 5 minions plus the Puppet (accessed in Level 2) in your pool; you can only have three active at a time. Lots of different combinations seem to work well making it hard to go too wrong with your choices, although there seems to be little love for the Goblin. In addition to the equipment slots listed for each minion all minions can also equip one rune. Once a minion is in the pool it will receive experience points whether it is active or not. You can change your active minions at any time, except in battle.
* Abomination - Damage. Warhammers, all Armor, shield, one accessory
* Cultist - Healer. Maces, light/medium Armor, Shield, one accessory
* Ghost - Chains, two accessories
* Goblin - Thief. Daggers, light Armor, one accessory. Notes: do not get for lock picking skills
* Imp - Magic user/(De)Buff). Robes, two accessories
* Minotaur - Damage. Axes, light Armor, one accessory
* Puppet - Multipurpose. Body parts. Notes: only one opportunity to get the Puppet.
* Shadow - Two accessories
* Skeleton - Defender/Damage. Longswords, all Armor, shield, one accessory
* Troll - Damage. Katars, light Armor, one accessory
* Vampire - Damage/Healer. Greatswords, light/medium Armor, one accessory
* Werewolf - Damage. light Armor, two accessories
* Witch - Healer/(De)Buff). Staffs, light Armor, one accessory

* Sorcerer (you) - Magic user/Damage. Most weapons, light Armor, two accessories. Notes: Develops into Arch Magus or Knight Magus

Sanctuary
* Talking to denizens of the Sanctuary will give you clues about what to expect on each dungeon level.
* Teleport back to your room to recover hp and energy from resting.
* Access the catacombs by providing souls from the dungeons to the Reaper in the Strange old house.
* Train your party.
* Merchant whose not so good equipment upgrades after each level.

Shopping - You can find merchants in Sanctuary and the Catacombs.
* Equipment available for sale upgrades after completion of a dungeon level.
* However, you will mostly want to use the merchants to sell stuff to get gems for training since you usually get better equipment from drops in dungeons and catacombs.
* Sell all Treasure Items.
* If you do not have the Puppet in your party remember to sell its parts for jewels as well as any other equipment that cannot be used by the members of your party.

Training - Suggested order of priority for training. Training costs increase rapidly for each additional level of training (200 for level 1, 400 for level 2, 800 for level 3, 1400 for level 4, 2000 for level 5, 2800 for level 6, ...) so you will want to plan a bit, starting with deciding who you want in your party.
1. Energy - used for special skills
2. Defense - protects against attacks
3. Agility - increases the likelihood that you will move first
4. Magic for magic classes
5. Strength for damage classes
6. Weapon training for damage classes
7. HP

Treasure
* Puzzles - All dungeon levels have hidden doors, locked doors, walls that disappear or can be walked through, etc. If you miss a puzzle you can go back to the level to try to find it. Puzzles may require finding switches or finding/creating keys. You will know when there is a puzzle/hidden spot when the 'Search' sign appears on the top right of the game screen.
* Treasure can be found in most clickable items including pots, chests, shelves, and boxes.
* Catacomb levels will replenish treasure, dungeon levels will not. If you need more experience/treasure then return to the catacombs.

I'm now half way through the game, but I have experimented quite a bit and can now give some advice.

I figured out, there are two main tricks about the game:
1) Equip is king. This sounds trivial, but isn't. The success of a party is mainly based on the loot it finds and is able to put to use. Just to give you one example: while your standart light armor does 12 def, you're able to find a 70 def light armor by chance. And this continues throughout the game, good loot is three to six times as good as the regular one. Thus the main question about composing a party is reducing redundancy in equip and maximising the stuff you can use. Skills aren't that important.

2) Debuffs suck, Buffs are meh. Are you thinking of a party that can lockdown enemies? Not gonna happen. All debuffs are chance based and tend not to work against bosses. Sad but true, go for damage.

So this leads us to wanting a party that dishes out much damage while using the least same items as possible.
During the game you will be able to summon 6 minions, 3 of them are active in your party, while the other 3 are stashed away. Also you will be able to summon a puppet as a companion at one early point in the game, but not any earlier or later. The party I recommend consists of these:

Vampire
Werewolf
Shadow
Minotaur

and two of these

Puppet
Skeleton
Abomination

At the start of the game, you should summon Vampire, Werewolf and Shadow.
Before battling the first boss you should summon the Minotaur or Puppet and the Skeleton or Abmoination.
After that summon the Minotaur, if you don't have it yet, then the Skeleton or Abomination whichever is missing.

Here's why:
The vampire is a damage dealer, tank, healer... litterally everthing, whitout any real downside.
The werewolf is independant of any weapon, his damage is always good. He also can deal AOE damage and has a regeneration.
The shadow is a glasscannon, it cannot use any weapon or amor, but packs a punch. As long as you don't have decent armor at all, this one is your best friend.
The Minotaur is the hardest hitting minion in the game, so take him for that.
Skeleton and Abomination are the only minons who can utilize heavy armor also their damage is still decent.

Now to the puppet.
The puppet uses it's own set of equipment, which you can either get via grinding through the catacombs or buying. However, money is power. At the skilltrainer, you can buy power for money, thus you won't ever have any spare money to equip the puppet. On the other hand the puppet sometimes has better buyable equipment than the other minions. So, if you're going to grind, take the puppet, especially on higher difficulty settings, if you wan't to count on your luck, you're better off without it.

PS:
-The troll is said to be a damage dealer... don't trust a trollolololol.
-For some reason, daggers seem to be decent weapons for the sorcerer.
-Later on your Sorcerer will either become a more powerful mage, or gain the amility to equip und utilize medium armor and greatswords, this creates redundancy with the vampire, while still beeing the better choise in my oppinion, so choose carefully.

--My advice is just go with what you like and don't let others discourage you from your choices, all things work really well in the game. (and the werewolf has been fixed, in case you ever read about him being a little bugged).---

Actually, I disagree with the post above. The game actually *encourages* you to build the party you'd like to play because the summons often have various powers that mesh really well. So there's not much of a chance to screw up, unless you decide to play on the hardest difficulty, which just means that enemies just hit harder and have more HP as well, I think.

If you look through the (yep, here it goes again) Steam forums people actually say the game is much more easier with good debuffers, they work really well. The Ghost, the Witch, the Imp, these are the first three I can think of who are really great for enemy lockdowns (or at least the latter two). The Imp can put the entire enemy team to sleep which does wonders, especially when you play one of the previous versions where the enemies don't wake up properly.

So no, debuffs and buffs are great if you know how to use them and they usually only don't work much on bosses. And changing difficulty might change something, but even in the 1980s mode I did manage to put a good number of enemies to sleep in the demo version.

Going just for damage isn't a good advice as this game is built around strategy and all who've finished it say that debuff/buffs are a good idea - unless you play 1980s mode you can pick ANY party you want and you should be able to finish the game.

While the above is generally true, I would not recommend going with a pure-caster party. You want at least one melee heavy in there.

Also, training costs don't double at each level. It looks this way from the first three (200, 400, 800), but it scales more slowly after that (1400, 2000, 2800, etc).

Some skills have a 5-rank limit but most have a 10-rank one.

Thank you for the correction. I just noticed the level up costs in my last upgrade and will change my post to reflect the later level costs.

To weigh in on the minions: I am going caster heavy on this play through, which turns out to be a good thing because I am not getting good weapon drops for the heavy hitters. I actually had to buy equipment so they could at least do a little damage. It takes a while to get to the higher level skills but the Witch is a solid member of my party. I rely on her for regeneration, bait, and buff/debuffs. She can also do some decent damage with a good staff, witchfire and poison. And restore defense to all party members, which she acquires at lower levels, has been a life-saver.

The werewolf is a good option for avoiding gear challenges since he doesn't rely on a weapon. In fact, he has an interesting synergy with the Witch and her Bait, because while he isn't a tankish type, his counter-attack stance combined with Bait can generate a lot of extra attacks, and his self-Regeneration and her healing spells can keep him up despite all of the incoming damage.

The werewolf also synergizes well with casters in that, while you probably want to use multiattack powers against large groups, the Fire Claws/Ice Claws combination, coupled with the fact that he's likely to act first in a round (because of his high Agility), means that he can apply a debuff before the casters nail the target with cold/fire spells later in the round, which makes those spells much more punishing.

Cheesy, but it's worth noting that if you reload a save from before opening a container, the RNG rolls a new item. (A few containers have set items.)

Let me start by saying I'm glad this game exists, but...

It is seriously lacking in polish...
- No quicksave. Were I the developer, in a "contempory" take on a game like this, a quicksave is a must.
- If your character is incapacitated in battle, and their combat turn comes up, it defaults to attack, when defend is your only available option.
- You can freeze the game in such scenarios as trying to cancel a buy/sell from merchant with button to which you have selected for cancel (default: right mouse).
- The difficult ramp is a mess. The second boss was, by far, the hardest fight in the game. Admittedly, I only played it on "normal", but the game was a cakewalk afterwards, save, maybe when you run into enemies that cast sleep on your entire party, via a single spell, and seemingly sans "saving throw". Oh, and the final few levels.
- The melee/magic balance, for me, was way off. I only found 4 other party members, selecting vampire, werewolf, shadow, and minotaur. I benched the werewolf because I found the crowd-control attack abilities were tantamount to useless - singular attacks were far more effective. My "glass cannon" (the glass part was right) shadow's magic never produced the amount of damage (not even close) output of the vampire which was, by far, my best summon. Not only did vampire have the best defense, close to as many HPs as the minotaur, healing spells, but it also had the best damage output (normal attack, and Inhuman Strike).
- Though I never tried the Arch Magus path, I definitely think I made the right choice with Arch Knight, as per reasons above.
- At least on normal, I just spammed 1 ability with most characters. The vampire's Inhuman Strike being the best for summons. Minotaur's Brutal Strike (later used Knockdown to take magic users off the board for a turn). Sorcerer's Arcane Blade (Arch Knight path) that eventually became better than vampire's. Shadow's various single-hit spells: arcane, fire, ice, then regen magic (later used Fear to take magic users off the board for a turn) on turns when you're out of energy, as his physical hits are useless.
- I don't think you can see how many gems (money) you have, unless you visit the merchant, or the trainer.
- Merchant buy/sell item screen bouncing around when you click on something.
- No option to turn off music or sound effects, let alone an option to adjust them.

Tips...
- You only regain energy during a fight, or when resting in town. Traversal through dungeons doesn't regen energy or health (you can use healing spells, but that energy cost never gets refunded until fight/rest).
- After you've reached town, and have the Gem of Recall, just warp back to town after you finish each level on the map, so you can rest (full stats, and restores downed summons on the lesser difficulty settings), and then return to the map. You don't lose anything in this process - you're starting at the beginning of each map with full regen. On the last area, you'll probably be using this between every fight, unless you want to chew up your usable items.
- You can save/load before opening the large chests (particularly the ones post boss battles), that seem to contain the best loot, until you find something that's useful, you dirty cheater.
- I didn't replay the game, as it isn't good enough, imo, so I didn't try other summons, but I'd recommend the melee ones (vampire duals as melee/healer). Magic damage, in my experience, was pathetic. The great swords seem to be, by far, the best weapons in the game - so pick summons that can use those. Axes, for example, have a large delta between low and high damage, so you can do very low damage, whereas greatswords' low damage range is much higher. Perhaps support magic users are more effective than offensive magic users? Spells that take enemies off the board for a turn (seal, knockdown) are effective in the later going.
- My fault, but I didn't figure out the "Search" thing until later in the game. When you get that popup, you have to click around to find a hidden switch, etc.

I'd rather replay other similar games in the genre like, say, Eye of the Beholder (and oldie, but a greatie).