Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

A card game that keeps changing what kind of game it is. The difficulty is noticing which rules you are allowed to break, and when.

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

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.

It barely tests your hands at all and is one of the most punishing games here anyway: saving takes ten seconds at a fixed terminal and can be interrupted, so every stretch of progress is a bet you are choosing to hold.

Tool-based puzzles that stay scrupulously fair, while the optional stars quietly assume you will break the rules the tutorial spent an hour teaching.

Turn-based with a parry or dodge on every incoming attack, so a fight you have the stats for can still be lost by hands. Learning a boss’s rhythm is the build.

Single-player is as gentle as you set it; Ultimate Team online is a different game where defending is manual and everyone else has practised it.

Ordinary play is gentle. The route the game remembers you taking turns two of its fights into some of the strictest bullet hell in the catalogue.

Straightforward once you find the right weapon, and famously obtuse about its second half — the difficulty is knowing that half exists at all.