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.

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.

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.

The friendliest the series has been — focus strikes, a mount that finds the monster for you — and the tempered fights at the end still ask for the matchup knowledge Monster Hunter always did.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hazard 5 with four dwarves is a coordination problem. Solo with Bosco is a slower, different game that the hazard tiers do not really account for.

Give Me God of War removes the stagger the whole combat loop leans on, and turns the optional Valkyries into the fights people put the controller down over.