Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

Rewind, a braking line and drivatar tuning let anyone finish anything. The difficulty is entirely opt-in, and turning the assists off makes it a different game.

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

Finishing is trivial and winning is not. The item distribution is designed to take the lead off you, so the skill being tested is holding first place rather than reaching it.

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

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.

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.

Swinging is forgiving by design. The spikes are the crowded arena fights on Ultimate, where one unblocked rifle burst is most of a health bar.

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.

Every individual mechanic is trivial; the difficulty is entirely another human being who cannot hear what you are shouting.