Ask for the shape of the challenge.

One hit kills you and one hit kills them, and the retry is instant. Each room is a plan you rehearse at speed, not an endurance test.

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

Each boss is a fixed piece of choreography that you learn by dying to its second phase forty consecutive times.

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

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

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

Nothing but boss fights, each a bullet hell and a duel at once. Phases checkpoint until the late ones, which do not.

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.

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.