Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

It punishes the instinct to retreat — the only way to get your health back is to keep hitting the thing that took it.

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

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.

A parry game wearing a Souls coat: dodging alone will carry you for two hours and then stop working entirely.

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.

Faster than Hollow Knight and less forgiving with it. Enemies crowd, healing is a commitment rather than a pause, and the early bosses assume reflexes the first game spent thirty hours building.

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

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

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