Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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

Gentler than the first game and better taught. The co-op campaign is where the difficulty actually lives, because it needs two people to see the same solution at once.

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.

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

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.

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.

Hard for exactly as long as it takes the idea to arrive, then trivial — a game of realisations rather than of skill.

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.

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.