Ask for the shape of the challenge.

You can finish it by mashing. The difficulty lives entirely in the gap between finishing it and playing it, and the game is happy to let you ignore that gap forever.

One hit kills, restarts land in under a second, and momentum is mandatory — stopping to think is usually the thing that kills you.

NES difficulty with modern checkpoints — and you can smash the checkpoints for gold, which is the game’s whole attitude in one mechanic.

Modern checkpoint generosity on the surface, with a completion layer underneath that wants every box and no deaths across a level built to cause both.

Parry-first combat with windows tight enough that blocking on reflex fails and blocking on rhythm works.

The demons are a resource puzzle solved at a hundred and twenty beats per minute; stop moving to think and you are already dead.

A platform fighter with three attack buttons and no movelists to memorise, which makes it the cheapest way to find out whether the genre is for you.

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

The EMMI zones are one-hit deaths with a counter window measured in frames, and the bosses expect dodges on reaction rather than pattern.

The single-player is genuinely welcoming; ranked is a decade of other people’s practice delivered eight frames at a time.