Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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.

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

Orbital mechanics with no tutorial worth the name. It is endlessly patient about failure and completely unwilling to explain a delta-v budget.

Armour has to be stripped before any control lands, surfaces do more damage than swords, and the game explains neither. Act two is where under-levelled parties stop entirely.

Thermodynamics as a colony sim. The base that runs beautifully for forty cycles fails on the sixtieth because the heat had nowhere to go.

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.

No luck and no reflexes: every loss is a chess problem you were shown in full and got wrong anyway.

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.

A card game that keeps changing what kind of game it is. The difficulty is noticing which rules you are allowed to break, and when.