Ask for the shape of the challenge.

The only thing gating progress is knowledge inside your own head, which makes it unspoilable once and unplayable if you look it up.

It is not hard to survive so much as hard to be told nothing and still choose the right direction.

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

Badges let you paper over whichever skill you lack. The special world at the end is the only place it stops being polite about that.

The only game here that ships the site’s own thesis as a menu option — combat and puzzle difficulty are two separate settings, and the two are genuinely unrelated demands.

Gentler than the first game and better taught. The co-op campaign is where the difficulty actually lives, because it needs two people to see the same solution at once.

Hard for exactly as long as it takes the idea to arrive, then trivial — a game of realisations rather than of skill.

The main path is generous and the last stretch of Moons is not — the hard version of this game is entirely opt-in and clearly signposted.

Generous by design and confident enough not to pretend otherwise. The optional speedrun levels at the end are the only place it bares its teeth.

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.