Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Poker hands as a scaling problem. The ante climbs faster than a fair deck can, so a run lives or dies on whether the multiplier joker you needed ever appeared in the shop.

The rules are the difficulty. A fight lost on turn one was lost in the inventory screen, and the game is content to let you walk into an encounter five levels early without a word. Honour mode makes one wipe final; Explorer makes almost nothing final.

Nothing fails quickly. A road laid in the first hour becomes unfixable in the twentieth, and that delay is the only real difficulty in it.

Every run is decided by about ten card choices you made while thinking about something else.

Deity is an economy handicap rather than a smarter opponent, so the skill is knowing which of forty systems can be safely ignored this particular game.

Two games at once — a campaign map that decides the war and real-time battles that can still lose it. Army composition answers most questions before the fighting starts.

Classic mode makes every death permanent, and the calendar decides months in advance who will be strong enough to survive. Maddening turns recruitment into its own strategy layer.

The aircraft are modelled well past where the tutorials stop. An instrument approach in an airliner is a procedure most people learn outside the game entirely.

A city builder where the scarce resource is time and every law you sign is unrepealable. The storm arrives on schedule whether or not the city is ready.

Progression is gated behind bosses you are expected to build an arena for, and the game tells you almost none of that. Hardmode is a difficulty setting you trigger permanently, by hand.