Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Depth and darkness rather than combat. It is careful never to tell you where to go, which is either the appeal or the wall depending on the player.

Document checking against a clock, where the rules change every morning and a mistake comes out of the family’s rent.

Difficulty as an inventory problem: every fight you choose to take is ammunition you will not have for the one you did not see coming.

A build with no points where it matters hits walls it can neither talk nor shoot past. Hardcore mode adds logistics, and the Deathclaws north of Goodsprings teach direction before the game does.

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

The difficulty is logistics — weight, terrain and route planning — with combat as an interruption you are usually allowed to walk around.

The only game here that ships the site’s own thesis as a menu option — combat and puzzle difficulty are two separate settings, and the two are genuinely unrelated demands.

Every problem has a build that solves it, so the difficulty is whether you think to make one. The Depths are darker and meaner than anything in Breath of the Wild.

It is not hard to survive so much as hard to be told nothing and still choose the right direction.

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.