Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Death is frequent, instant and immediately retried, and every puzzle is solvable from what the room shows you. Nothing here is hidden from a patient player.

It is not hard to survive so much as hard to be told nothing and still choose the right direction.

Hard for exactly as long as it takes the idea to arrive, then trivial — a game of realisations rather than of skill.

Gentler than the first game and better taught. The co-op campaign is where the difficulty actually lives, because it needs two people to see the same solution at once.

Two players, one screen, no difficulty setting. The hard part is coordination, and the game restarts you both a second after it goes wrong.

A fishing game with an inventory puzzle and a night timer. Panic is the mechanic, and the punishment for giving in to it is deliberately mild.

Difficulty as an inventory problem: every fight you choose to take is ammunition you will not have for the one you did not see coming.

No reflexes and no fights — you fail by having rolled badly on the question of who you decided to be twenty hours ago.

Generous dodges and plug-in chips that can automate half the combat, so the demand is low until Very Hard, where one hit ends you and the chip build becomes the game.

The genre’s shape at a fraction of its hostility — and the only one on this shelf that ships with a menu that will hand you a gun and skip the fight.