Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

Enormous and completely indifferent — most of its walls are optional, and it will never tell you which ones.

The one that attacks your resources rather than your reflexes — your maximum health falls every time you die, and the ambushes are designed around you not knowing they are there.

The difficulty is mostly geography — knowing which door to take is worth more than any weapon in the game.

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

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

The combat is the gentlest in the family and the systems are the cruellest — dying moves you to soul form at half health, and the game never says so.

A parry game wearing a Souls coat: dodging alone will carry you for two hours and then stop working entirely.

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.

Enemies act during your recovery frames and refuse to wait their turn. The famous difficulty is the ordinary encounters, not the bosses.