Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

The movement is the skill ceiling and nothing in the game mentions it — the players beating you are using techniques that were never taught, only tolerated.

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

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

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

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

Short and dense, and almost nothing in it is labelled — you learn what an item does by eating it and finding out.

Nothing is hidden and nothing is easy: every technique in the game is visible from the first match and takes hundreds of hours in the hands.

Pace notes, no rewind on the harder settings, and a damage model that ends a rally on one bad corner. The hardest driving in the catalogue by a distance.