Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Difficulty is a clock rather than a setting: everything you do to get stronger also makes the timer worse. Monsoon runs end in seconds when they end.

The walls are build checks rather than skill checks. The tutorial helicopter and the first real boss both exist to say that the fight is decided in the garage.

Directional swordfighting against two opponents is closer to a fighting game than an RPG, saving costs a drink, and the opening hours hand you a peasant who cannot read, ride or fight.

The combat is the gentlest in the family and the systems are the cruellest — dying moves you to soul form at half health, and the game never says so.

You choose which limb to cut off, which means every fight is a decision about what you want to be wearing afterwards rather than only about surviving it.

Short and dense, and almost nothing in it is labelled — you learn what an item does by eating it and finding out.

Its difficulty is crowd control, not duels: the game throws groups and ranged attackers at you constantly, and the second world doubles the population.

Everything the 3D games do, minus a camera and plus a pit — the second axis of movement is gone, so a mistimed roll usually means falling somewhere worse.

Every death ages you, and an old master dies in two hits. The run-level economy is what punishes learning a boss the slow way.

Heavy attacks with no cancel, instant-death platforming, and guilt fragments that tax you for dying exactly where you were already struggling.