Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

Rhythm violence at speeds that stop being readable. The later levels are memorised rather than reacted to, whatever it feels like at the time.

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

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

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.

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.

One input, no health, and no checkpoints outside practice — a level is a single unbroken performance, so failing at ninety-eight percent costs exactly as much as failing at two.

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

Enemies act during your recovery frames and refuse to wait their turn. The famous difficulty is the ordinary encounters, not the bosses.