Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Rise apologises for nothing in its expansion — the endgame Anomaly hunts are the hardest sustained content the series has shipped.

The expansion where the series stops being polite: Master Rank monsters hit for most of your health bar and expect the matchup knowledge the base game let you skip.

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

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

Aim matters less than knowing what the other team can do to you, and the roster is large enough that this takes a very long time to learn.

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.

Its difficulty is crowd control, not duels: the game throws groups and ranged attackers at you constantly, and the second world doubles the population.

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.

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