Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

Slow, heavy and unforgiving — one bullet from someone you never saw ends thirty minutes, and the correct play is usually to not take the fight.

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.

Building is a second game bolted to the first, played at a speed that looks like a bug, and the mode that removes it is where most people should start.