Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Two games glued together, and the management half is where a run is actually lost — a starving flock undoes a perfectly good dungeon.

A simulator with a full wall of assists in front of it, so the same corner can be a formality or a genuine test depending on what you left switched on.

Every problem has a build that solves it, so the difficulty is whether you think to make one. The Depths are darker and meaner than anything in Breath of the Wild.

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.

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.

Hard in a way that always moves forward: you lose the run but never the hour, because failure is the currency the next attempt is bought with.

The genre’s shape at a fraction of its hostility — and the only one on this shelf that ships with a menu that will hand you a gun and skip the fight.

Machines have components you are meant to shoot off with the right element. A player who ignores that fights the same Thunderjaw for ten minutes with the wrong arrows.

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.

It is not hard to survive so much as hard to be told nothing and still choose the right direction.