Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Instant death in both directions and an instant restart. The difficulty is entirely in how quickly you commit to a floor plan you have already memorised.

One hit kills you and one hit kills them, and the retry is instant. Each room is a plan you rehearse at speed, not an endurance test.

The demons are a resource puzzle solved at a hundred and twenty beats per minute; stop moving to think and you are already dead.

NES difficulty with modern checkpoints — and you can smash the checkpoints for gold, which is the game’s whole attitude in one mechanic.

Each boss is a fixed piece of choreography that you learn by dying to its second phase forty consecutive times.

You can save anywhere for a resource cost, which turns the escape sequences into a planning problem: no soul links means no checkpoints, and the game does not hand them back.

You can finish it by mashing. The difficulty lives entirely in the gap between finishing it and playing it, and the game is happy to let you ignore that gap forever.

Momentum platforming with hitboxes that reward commitment and punish hesitation. Funky Mode exists because the late levels ask for a great deal.

Parry-first combat with windows tight enough that blocking on reflex fails and blocking on rhythm works.

The shield parry replaces Eternal’s resource juggling, so the demand moves from managing three meters to reading incoming attacks. The difficulty sliders are unusually granular about which of those you want.