Ask for the shape of the challenge.

One hit kills, restarts land in under a second, and momentum is mandatory — stopping to think is usually the thing that kills you.

NES difficulty with modern checkpoints — and you can smash the checkpoints for gold, which is the game’s whole attitude in one mechanic.

The demons are a resource puzzle solved at a hundred and twenty beats per minute; stop moving to think and you are already dead.

Parry-first combat with windows tight enough that blocking on reflex fails and blocking on rhythm works.

A platform fighter with three attack buttons and no movelists to memorise, which makes it the cheapest way to find out whether the genre is for you.

You can finish it by mashing. The difficulty lives entirely in the gap between finishing it and playing it, and the game is happy to let you ignore that gap forever.

The EMMI zones are one-hit deaths with a counter window measured in frames, and the bosses expect dodges on reaction rather than pattern.

Modern checkpoint generosity on the surface, with a completion layer underneath that wants every box and no deaths across a level built to cause both.

Frame-perfect demands wrapped in the kindest failure state in games — you will die two thousand times and each one costs you half a second.

Auto-combos hide a genuinely deep three-character team fighter. The gap between mashing the light button and an assist-extended combo is the entire learning curve.