Ask for the shape of the challenge.

A hundred and seventy champions, each with four abilities you are expected to know the cooldowns of, and the tutorial covers none of 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.

Every wall, floor and ceiling is destructible and every one of seventy-odd operators changes what a room means, so the hardest part is a memory problem rather than an aiming one.

The rare strategy game that is also an execution test: the plan is worthless if your hands cannot run it at the pace it assumes. The campaign is a gentle front for that.

Enormous and completely indifferent — most of its walls are optional, and it will never tell you which ones.

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 subscription racing simulator with licence classes, a safety rating and no assists worth the name — the difficulty is that it is not pretending.

A simulated ecosystem that has no interest in being fair. Movement takes twenty hours to feel deliberate, the rain cycle takes back anything you did not bank, and nothing is explained at any point.

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.

Every pixel is simulated, so every run is one wand mistake away from killing you instantly. Wand editing is a programming language the game never teaches.