Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Every run is decided by about ten card choices you made while thinking about something else.

Nothing threatens you for hours — and then the base you laid out at hour four becomes the thing you cannot fix at hour forty.

A card game that keeps changing what kind of game it is. The difficulty is noticing which rules you are allowed to break, and when.

Poker hands as a scaling problem. The ante climbs faster than a fair deck can, so a run lives or dies on whether the multiplier joker you needed ever appeared in the shop.

The rules are the difficulty. A fight lost on turn one was lost in the inventory screen, and the game is content to let you walk into an encounter five levels early without a word. Honour mode makes one wipe final; Explorer makes almost nothing final.

Orbital mechanics with no tutorial worth the name. It is endlessly patient about failure and completely unwilling to explain a delta-v budget.

Armour has to be stripped before any control lands, surfaces do more damage than swords, and the game explains neither. Act two is where under-levelled parties stop entirely.

You do not lose fights here, you lose campaigns — and usually about three missions before you notice.

A city builder where the scarce resource is time and every law you sign is unrepealable. The storm arrives on schedule whether or not the city is ready.

Nothing fails quickly. A road laid in the first hour becomes unfixable in the twentieth, and that delay is the only real difficulty in it.