Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Depth and darkness rather than combat. It is careful never to tell you where to go, which is either the appeal or the wall depending on the player.

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.

The difficulty is logistics — weight, terrain and route planning — with combat as an interruption you are usually allowed to walk around.

Reflex mode quietly saves every blown infiltration. Turn it off and the enemy adapts to whatever you did last mission, which is where the game gets interesting.

Nothing in it is hard to do; almost everything in it is hard to find out that you can do.

Real-time pressure with an ATB gauge underneath it. Bosses are staggered checklists, and the materia loadout decides whether a fight is a wall or a formality.

Difficulty as an inventory problem: every fight you choose to take is ammunition you will not have for the one you did not see coming.

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.

Creature collection with a base-automation layer underneath it. The difficulty sliders are unusually honest about the fact that the grind is the game.

Weakness targeting is the whole of combat, and the calendar is the real difficulty: a day spent wrong in November cannot be spent again.