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.

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

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

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

Nothing is hidden and nothing is easy: every technique in the game is visible from the first match and takes hundreds of hours in the hands.

Rise apologises for nothing in its expansion — the endgame Anomaly hunts are the hardest sustained content the series has shipped.

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.

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.

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