Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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