Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Ki pulse turns stamina from something you spend into something you play in rhythm, and the game asks for it in the first hour without ever insisting you learn it.

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

A subscription racing simulator with licence classes, a safety rating and no assists worth the name — the difficulty is that it is not pretending.