Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Creature collection with a base-automation layer underneath it. The difficulty sliders are unusually honest about the fact that the grind is the game.

Depth and darkness rather than combat. It is careful never to tell you where to go, which is either the appeal or the wall depending on the player.

Largos and tarrs will wreck a careless corral overnight, which is as close as this gets to a fail state.

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.

Needs decay on a timer and nothing else really threatens you. The depth is in what the systems let you build rather than in anything they demand.

Hazard 5 with four dwarves is a coordination problem. Solo with Bosco is a slower, different game that the hazard tiers do not really account for.

Barely a difficulty at all — the only obstacle is the calendar, which hands out content one real-world day at a time and cannot be argued with.

Progression is gated behind bosses you are expected to build an arena for, and the game tells you almost none of that. Hardmode is a difficulty setting you trigger permanently, by hand.

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.

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.