Ask for the shape of the challenge.

It plays itself for the first ten minutes, then asks whether you were paying attention to what you were building the whole time.

Class decides how hard the game is. Insanity turns every squad into a shield, armour and barrier check that punishes the wrong power loadout far more than bad aim.

A fishing game with an inventory puzzle and a night timer. Panic is the mechanic, and the punishment for giving in to it is deliberately mild.

The build carries the game. A netrunner or a sandevistan trivialises fights that a scattered stat spread makes unwinnable, and the difficulty setting only changes the numbers underneath that.

Difficulty is a slider, and the systems are exploitable enough that a determined player can break the game open by hour five. What is left is a very long walk.

The shooting is forgiving and Dead Eye forgives the rest. The difficulty is deliberate friction — animations you cannot cancel, a horse you have to keep alive, and mission failure for stepping outside the script.

Combat that yields immediately to a difficulty slider, wrapped around a preparation system the game quietly assumes you will ignore.

Largos and tarrs will wreck a careless corral overnight, which is as close as this gets to a fail state.

Needs decay on a timer and nothing else really threatens you. The depth is in what the systems let you build rather than in anything they demand.

Reversing a trailer into a bay is the skill ceiling and the fatigue timer is the only pressure. Damage costs money rather than progress.