Ask for the shape of the challenge.

The only real pressure is the clock: every day you spend without a plan is a day the season quietly takes back.

Reversing a trailer into a bay is the skill ceiling and the fatigue timer is the only pressure. Damage costs money rather than progress.

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

Level gating does the work encounter design would: a mercenary four levels above you is unkillable, and the game’s answer is more hours rather than a better plan.

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

The difficulty is logistics — weight, terrain and route planning — with combat as an interruption you are usually allowed to walk around.

A build with no points where it matters hits walls it can neither talk nor shoot past. Hardcore mode adds logistics, and the Deathclaws north of Goodsprings teach direction before the game does.

Two games glued together, and the management half is where a run is actually lost — a starving flock undoes a perfectly good dungeon.

Weakness targeting is the whole of combat, and the calendar is the real difficulty: a day spent wrong in November cannot be spent again.

Reflex mode quietly saves every blown infiltration. Turn it off and the enemy adapts to whatever you did last mission, which is where the game gets interesting.