Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Not difficult so much as undocumented — everything that kills you was perfectly legible, in a menu you did not know existed.

A storyteller AI aims raids at whatever you are worst at, and mood is a second economy that collapses faster than the defensive one.

Armour has to be stripped before any control lands, surfaces do more damage than swords, and the game explains neither. Act two is where under-levelled parties stop entirely.

Hundreds of hours of interlocking systems with a mid-game crisis on a timer. Most losses happen fifty in-game years before anybody notices them.

Division templates, supply and production efficiency are the game, and none of them are on screen when you start. The front line is only ever a symptom.

The failure state is a confused kind of boredom — you will rule for two centuries before you work out what you were supposed to be doing.

The rules are the difficulty. A fight lost on turn one was lost in the inventory screen, and the game is content to let you walk into an encounter five levels early without a word. Honour mode makes one wipe final; Explorer makes almost nothing final.

Orbital mechanics with no tutorial worth the name. It is endlessly patient about failure and completely unwilling to explain a delta-v budget.

The town is gone, so there is no bank of spare heroes to absorb a bad decision — a run is four people and every relationship between them is a mechanic.

Nothing threatens you for hours — and then the base you laid out at hour four becomes the thing you cannot fix at hour forty.