Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Classic mode makes every death permanent, and the calendar decides months in advance who will be strong enough to survive. Maddening turns recruitment into its own strategy layer.

Aim is only half of it — the generation means the run you get may simply not contain the item you needed, and the game will not tell you that either.

Death drops your gear where you died, and where you died is usually the swamp. The stamina economy keeps fights short and losing them expensive.

It barely tests your hands at all and is one of the most punishing games here anyway: saving takes ten seconds at a fixed terminal and can be interrupted, so every stretch of progress is a bet you are choosing to hold.

Straightforward once you find the right weapon, and famously obtuse about its second half — the difficulty is knowing that half exists at all.

Souls stamina and checkpoints with a gun in your hands, so the dodge is still the answer but the aim decides whether the dodge was needed.