Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Cover disintegrates, healing means walking into the fight to collect it, and two optional bosses sit several tiers above everything around them.

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.

Kinder than the first in every way that matters — the instant-death platforming is gone — and the map is still built to be read rather than followed.

Hazard 5 with four dwarves is a coordination problem. Solo with Bosco is a slower, different game that the hazard tiers do not really account for.

Reflex mode quietly saves every blown infiltration. Turn it off and the enemy adapts to whatever you did last mission, which is where the game gets interesting.

A build with no points where it matters hits walls it can neither talk nor shoot past. Hardcore mode adds logistics, and the Deathclaws north of Goodsprings teach direction before the game does.

Creature collection with a base-automation layer underneath it. The difficulty sliders are unusually honest about the fact that the grind is the game.

Depth and darkness rather than combat. It is careful never to tell you where to go, which is either the appeal or the wall depending on the player.

Souls-shaped in its checkpoints and parry windows without souls-shaped stakes. Grandmaster punishes the block-heavy habits the lower difficulties let you keep.

Every problem has a build that solves it, so the difficulty is whether you think to make one. The Depths are darker and meaner than anything in Breath of the Wild.