Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Its difficulty is crowd control, not duels: the game throws groups and ranged attackers at you constantly, and the second world doubles the population.

You choose which limb to cut off, which means every fight is a decision about what you want to be wearing afterwards rather than only about surviving it.

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

A directional parry replaces the roll as the answer to almost everything, and the game is markedly better once it clicks and markedly worse until it does.

Slow, heavy and unforgiving — one bullet from someone you never saw ends thirty minutes, and the correct play is usually to not take the fight.

The world is kinder than Dark Souls and the bosses are considerably meaner — almost all of the difficulty has moved into the fog gates.

The walls are build checks rather than skill checks. The tutorial helicopter and the first real boss both exist to say that the fight is decided in the garage.

Bullet-hell reflexes bolted to roguelike stakes — the two hardest things to hold simultaneously for two uninterrupted hours.

Pace notes, no rewind on the harder settings, and a damage model that ends a rally on one bad corner. The hardest driving in the catalogue by a distance.

Every death ages you, and an old master dies in two hits. The run-level economy is what punishes learning a boss the slow way.