Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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.

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

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

Every wall, floor and ceiling is destructible and every one of seventy-odd operators changes what a room means, so the hardest part is a memory problem rather than an aiming one.

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

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.

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.

Counter-Strike’s stand-still-to-shoot rule with abilities layered on top, so a duel can be lost to a wall you did not know that agent could place.