Ask for the shape of the challenge.

The hardest thing here is unlearning defence — you cannot outlast anything, and the deflect window is the entire game.

The movement is the skill ceiling and nothing in the game mentions it — the players beating you are using techniques that were never taught, only tolerated.

A parry game wearing a Souls coat: dodging alone will carry you for two hours and then stop working entirely.

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.

Faster than Hollow Knight and less forgiving with it. Enemies crowd, healing is a commitment rather than a pause, and the early bosses assume reflexes the first game spent thirty hours building.

It punishes the instinct to retreat — the only way to get your health back is to keep hitting the thing that took it.

A bullet hell with a generous dodge roll and completely ungenerous boss patterns. The unlock grind is doing double duty as the difficulty curve.

Enormous and completely indifferent — most of its walls are optional, and it will never tell you which ones.

It refuses to let you play it any other way — until the deflect is automatic, nothing else you have ever learned will help.

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