Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Nothing in it is hard to do; almost everything in it is hard to find out that you can do.

It plays itself for the first ten minutes, then asks whether you were paying attention to what you were building the whole time.

A fishing game with an inventory puzzle and a night timer. Panic is the mechanic, and the punishment for giving in to it is deliberately mild.

The only real pressure is the clock: every day you spend without a plan is a day the season quietly takes back.

Reversing a trailer into a bay is the skill ceiling and the fatigue timer is the only pressure. Damage costs money rather than progress.

Difficulty is a slider, and the systems are exploitable enough that a determined player can break the game open by hour five. What is left is a very long walk.

The shooting is forgiving and Dead Eye forgives the rest. The difficulty is deliberate friction — animations you cannot cancel, a horse you have to keep alive, and mission failure for stepping outside the script.

A management game with no failure state. What it asks for is patience and a ferry schedule, not skill.

Class decides how hard the game is. Insanity turns every squad into a shield, armour and barrier check that punishes the wrong power loadout far more than bad aim.

The build carries the game. A netrunner or a sandevistan trivialises fights that a scattered stat spread makes unwinnable, and the difficulty setting only changes the numbers underneath that.