Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

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.

Every problem has a build that solves it, so the difficulty is whether you think to make one. The Depths are darker and meaner than anything in Breath of the Wild.

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

Difficulty as an inventory problem: every fight you choose to take is ammunition you will not have for the one you did not see coming.

Cover disintegrates, healing means walking into the fight to collect it, and two optional bosses sit several tiers above everything around them.

Five stances that each want a different defensive habit, on a difficulty curve gentle enough that you can reach the end still using the first one.

Generous dodges and plug-in chips that can automate half the combat, so the demand is low until Very Hard, where one hit ends you and the chip build becomes the game.

A metroidvania that fights with summoned spirits on cooldowns rather than a weapon, so encounters are about rotation and spacing instead of stamina.

Beautiful and forgiving right up to the escape sequences, which convert a gentle metroidvania into a memorisation test with no warning at all.