Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

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.

A directional parry replaces the roll as the answer to almost everything, and the game is markedly better once it clicks and markedly worse until it does.

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

Bullet-hell reflexes bolted to roguelike stakes — the two hardest things to hold simultaneously for two uninterrupted hours.

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 mage hunts turn every boss into a chase across the map, which trades the first game’s clean duels for something closer to attrition.

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

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