Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Faster than Hollow Knight and less forgiving with it. Enemies crowd, healing is a commitment rather than a pause, and the early bosses assume reflexes the first game spent thirty hours building.

It punishes the instinct to retreat — the only way to get your health back is to keep hitting the thing that took it.

Everything the 3D games do, minus a camera and plus a pit — the second axis of movement is gone, so a mistimed roll usually means falling somewhere worse.

A bullet hell with a generous dodge roll and completely ungenerous boss patterns. The unlock grind is doing double duty as the difficulty curve.

A parry game wearing a Souls coat: dodging alone will carry you for two hours and then stop working entirely.

The difficulty is mostly geography — knowing which door to take is worth more than any weapon in the game.

The hardest thing here is unlearning defence — you cannot outlast anything, and the deflect window is the entire game.

Enormous and completely indifferent — most of its walls are optional, and it will never tell you which ones.

The movement is the skill ceiling and nothing in the game mentions it — the players beating you are using techniques that were never taught, only tolerated.

Three in-game days on a shrinking map, so the usual answer to a FromSoftware wall — go somewhere else and come back stronger — is the one thing the clock will not sell you.