Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

Heavy attacks with no cancel, instant-death platforming, and guilt fragments that tax you for dying exactly where you were already struggling.

The world is kinder than Dark Souls and the bosses are considerably meaner — almost all of the difficulty has moved into the fog gates.

Steady, honest pressure plus a map that makes you earn the right to know where you are standing.

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.

Short and dense, and almost nothing in it is labelled — you learn what an item does by eating it and finding out.

You choose which limb to cut off, which means every fight is a decision about what you want to be wearing afterwards rather than only about surviving it.

A directional parry replaces the roll as the answer to almost everything, and the game is markedly better once it clicks and markedly worse until it does.

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