Ask for the shape of the challenge.

The hardest thing here is unlearning defence — you cannot outlast anything, and the deflect window is the entire game.

The world is kinder than Dark Souls and the bosses are considerably meaner — almost all of the difficulty has moved into the fog gates.

Bullet-hell reflexes bolted to roguelike stakes — the two hardest things to hold simultaneously for two uninterrupted hours.

A directional parry replaces the roll as the answer to almost everything, and the game is markedly better once it clicks and markedly worse until it does.

It punishes the instinct to retreat — the only way to get your health back is to keep hitting the thing that took it.

Every death ages you, and an old master dies in two hits. The run-level economy is what punishes learning a boss the slow way.

It refuses to let you play it any other way — until the deflect is automatic, nothing else you have ever learned will help.

A bullet hell with a generous dodge roll and completely ungenerous boss patterns. The unlock grind is doing double duty as the difficulty curve.

Three in-game days on a shrinking map, so the usual answer to a FromSoftware wall — go somewhere else and come back stronger — is the one thing the clock will not sell you.

Faster than Hollow Knight and less forgiving with it. Enemies crowd, healing is a commitment rather than a pause, and the early bosses assume reflexes the first game spent thirty hours building.