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.

Souls difficulty plus a fighting game’s input list plus a loot game’s spreadsheet, and none of the three is optional.

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

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

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

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

A MOBA played from behind the character, so half your abilities have to be aimed and the other half have to be aimed while something is aiming at you.

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

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

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