Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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