Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Every individual mechanic is trivial; the difficulty is entirely another human being who cannot hear what you are shouting.

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

Combat is scored on the beat and will still let you win off it. Playing to the rhythm is the difference between a rank and a mess.

A blockbuster that expects to be finished, with the actual demands parked in optional bosses you can walk past without the story noticing.

Crushing is the only setting where the shooting bites. Everything else is a set piece that restarts you a few seconds before it went wrong.

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.

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.

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

Swinging is forgiving by design. The spikes are the crowded arena fights on Ultimate, where one unblocked rifle burst is most of a health bar.