Ask for the shape of the challenge.

The combat is the gentlest in the family and the systems are the cruellest — dying moves you to soul form at half health, and the game never says so.

Three in-game days on a shrinking map, so the usual answer to a FromSoftware wall — go somewhere else and come back stronger — is the one thing the clock will not sell you.

A bullet hell with a generous dodge roll and completely ungenerous boss patterns. The unlock grind is doing double duty as the difficulty curve.

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

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

A MOBA played from behind the character, so half your abilities have to be aimed and the other half have to be aimed while something is aiming at you.

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

The expansion where the series stops being polite: Master Rank monsters hit for most of your health bar and expect the matchup knowledge the base game let you skip.

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

Souls difficulty plus a fighting game’s input list plus a loot game’s spreadsheet, and none of the three is optional.