Ask for the shape of the challenge.

A MOBA played from behind the character, so half your abilities have to be aimed and the other half have to be aimed while something is aiming at you.

A hundred and seventy champions, each with four abilities you are expected to know the cooldowns of, and the tutorial covers none of it.

Every wall, floor and ceiling is destructible and every one of seventy-odd operators changes what a room means, so the hardest part is a memory problem rather than an aiming one.

The rare strategy game that is also an execution test: the plan is worthless if your hands cannot run it at the pace it assumes. The campaign is a gentle front for that.

Counter-Strike’s stand-still-to-shoot rule with abilities layered on top, so a duel can be lost to a wall you did not know that agent could place.

A subscription racing simulator with licence classes, a safety rating and no assists worth the name — the difficulty is that it is not pretending.

Three in-game days on a shrinking map, so the usual answer to a FromSoftware wall — go somewhere else and come back stronger — is the one thing the clock will not sell you.

Twenty-five years of accumulated convention, none of it in the game — spray patterns, utility line-ups and default positions are all things you are assumed to already know.

Souls difficulty plus a fighting game’s input list plus a loot game’s spreadsheet, and none of the three is optional.

Ki pulse turns stamina from something you spend into something you play in rhythm, and the game asks for it in the first hour without ever insisting you learn it.