Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Ki pulse turns stamina from something you spend into something you play in rhythm, and the game asks for it in the first hour without ever insisting you learn it.

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

Every death is your own fault and every run is a fresh cave. The systems interact thoroughly enough that it kills you in ways nobody has written down yet.

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

It refuses to let you play it any other way — until the deflect is automatic, nothing else you have ever learned will help.

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.

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

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.

Twenty-five years of accumulated convention, none of it in the game — spray patterns, utility line-ups and default positions are all things you are assumed to already know.

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