Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Steady, honest pressure plus a map that makes you earn the right to know where you are standing.

Short and dense, and almost nothing in it is labelled — you learn what an item does by eating it and finding out.

Everything the 3D games do, minus a camera and plus a pit — the second axis of movement is gone, so a mistimed roll usually means falling somewhere worse.

You choose which limb to cut off, which means every fight is a decision about what you want to be wearing afterwards rather than only about surviving it.

The mage hunts turn every boss into a chase across the map, which trades the first game’s clean duels for something closer to attrition.

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.

The world is kinder than Dark Souls and the bosses are considerably meaner — almost all of the difficulty has moved into the fog gates.

The difficulty is mostly geography — knowing which door to take is worth more than any weapon in the game.

A directional parry replaces the roll as the answer to almost everything, and the game is markedly better once it clicks and markedly worse until it does.

Its difficulty is crowd control, not duels: the game throws groups and ranged attackers at you constantly, and the second world doubles the population.