Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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.

Crushing is the only setting where the shooting bites. Everything else is a set piece that restarts you a few seconds before it went wrong.

A blockbuster that expects to be finished, with the actual demands parked in optional bosses you can walk past without the story noticing.

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.

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.

Two players, one screen, no difficulty setting. The hard part is coordination, and the game restarts you both a second after it goes wrong.

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

A lullaby until the drop speed crosses whatever your reading threshold happens to be, at which point it becomes a pure reflex test with a very good soundtrack.

Beautiful and forgiving right up to the escape sequences, which convert a gentle metroidvania into a memorisation test with no warning at all.