Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Needs decay on a timer and nothing else really threatens you. The depth is in what the systems let you build rather than in anything they demand.

Largos and tarrs will wreck a careless corral overnight, which is as close as this gets to a fail state.

Nothing in it is hard to do; almost everything in it is hard to find out that you can do.

Creature collection with a base-automation layer underneath it. The difficulty sliders are unusually honest about the fact that the grind is the game.

Nothing fails quickly. A road laid in the first hour becomes unfixable in the twentieth, and that delay is the only real difficulty in it.

Progression is gated behind bosses you are expected to build an arena for, and the game tells you almost none of that. Hardmode is a difficulty setting you trigger permanently, by hand.

Death drops your gear where you died, and where you died is usually the swamp. The stamina economy keeps fights short and losing them expensive.

Orbital mechanics with no tutorial worth the name. It is endlessly patient about failure and completely unwilling to explain a delta-v budget.

Every pixel is simulated, so every run is one wand mistake away from killing you instantly. Wand editing is a programming language the game never teaches.