Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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