Ask for the shape of the challenge.

One input, no health, and no checkpoints outside practice — a level is a single unbroken performance, so failing at ninety-eight percent costs exactly as much as failing at two.

Rhythm violence at speeds that stop being readable. The later levels are memorised rather than reacted to, whatever it feels like at the time.

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

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.

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.

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

Faster than Hollow Knight and less forgiving with it. Enemies crowd, healing is a commitment rather than a pause, and the early bosses assume reflexes the first game spent thirty hours building.

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

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.

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