Wharf District is the first area of the game; it's impossible to skip or do it out of order.

Overview

The level is divided into three individual parts: The Rippling Walls, The Sole Regret and The Wharf District.

The Rippling Walls

This is where the game starts, and where the timing starts in a speedrun - at the same time as you gain control of the Kid. The first thing you have to do here is walk up to the Cael Hammer and pick it up in order to gain the ability to attack and Evade. Shortly after, there is a short cutscene that shows the first enemy in the game, a Gasfella that can be ignored. After rolling up-right, you will see a Fang Repeater, some debris blocking up the way, up the stairs a fountain and the entrance to the Sole Regret.

In order to progress, you will have to drink from the fountain, and kill a group of Squirts that spawn about 10 seconds afterwards. The Fang Repeater is optional.

The fastest way to complete this part, in every category, is to firstly ignore the Fang Repeater, destroy the debris blocking the stairs with a stationary Cael Hammer attack, roll up to the fountain, and drink from it. This will start the timer that will soon cause the Squirts to spawn. In the meantime, you must go back to pick up the Fang Repeater, return in time to kill the Squirts(which usually spawn on the 38-39 second if the level was done correctly so far), and finally enter the Sole Regret.

NG+ - thanks to the Hammer damage upgrades, the obstacles on the stairs can be cleared out with a single moving attack.

Sometimes if you interacted with the fountain too early after approaching it, the camera will get locked on the fountain(preventing you from going back and picking up the Repeater). You can wait it out, but a faster way to get rid of the camera lock is to fall down by rolling of the stairs. This camera lock can waste time in NG+ as you might not have enough time later to come back and clean out the railing around the fountain, thus making it harder to quickly kill the Squirts with the Repeater.

the Fountain Squirts

This fight will look different in NG and NG+. I recommend watching speedrun videos on the leaderboards to understand how to do it, as due to some RNG in the Squirts behaviour, many people have different styles of completing it.

In NG, the usual way to execute the Squirts fight is to first kill the top left and top right squirts, then walk up to manipulate every remaining Squirt into following you and finish them with one or two moving Hammer attacks.

NG+ categories will always shoot the Repeater with the homing upgrade from the left side of the entrance to the Sole Regret to kill all the Squirts in one sweep. Again, watch completed runs to see how this is done.