Starting out as an archer is rarely a good idea, because of the limited space; start with boring ol melee and blocking, then move on to archery when you have more space and hopefully more arrows. Focus mainly on horizontal expansion first, since you can go further that way and send your arrows through more empty spaces. Note that the arrows can all go in different directions, and don't have to make sense with how the bow is facing, if that makes arranging things easier. Make sure that you actually are firing all of your arrows; arranging them in certain ways could have them accidentally block each other from the bow. Archery works well with either of the extra energy items, since both benefit from empty spaces. With things like Belt of Knives or Stopwatch or to give you Rage or otherwise boost the power of all your attacks, sending the arrows through empty spaces becomes much less important, unless you are using the Poison arrows (those would do increasing amounts of damage like any other weapon, but the Poison amount only increases with empty spaces). Keep in mind that one of the Rare arrows Floats to the top, but also has special requirements to boost the damage, rather than benefitting from space. Things that increase in Rage when hit are dangerous if you can't kill them in one turn, since you will be hitting multiple times per energy, but Spikes are completely harmless to you, since your attacks are projectiles. If you are in the endgame but not Endless mode, if things go well enough you will do so much damage with each energy that you won't really need Block anymore; everything will just die before it can do anything dangerous. If you are in Endless, accept that you are probably gonna die in the first repeat of the third area, or maybe even the second if you get unlucky; very few types of builds can survive the Poison in those, and Archer is not one of them.