Ask for the shape of the challenge.

A card game that keeps changing what kind of game it is. The difficulty is noticing which rules you are allowed to break, and when.

It barely tests your hands at all and is one of the most punishing games here anyway: saving takes ten seconds at a fixed terminal and can be interrupted, so every stretch of progress is a bet you are choosing to hold.

Poker hands as a scaling problem. The ante climbs faster than a fair deck can, so a run lives or dies on whether the multiplier joker you needed ever appeared in the shop.

Death drops your gear where you died, and where you died is usually the swamp. The stamina economy keeps fights short and losing them expensive.

A city builder where the scarce resource is time and every law you sign is unrepealable. The storm arrives on schedule whether or not the city is ready.

It takes the one thing roguelikes normally give you — time to think — and puts it on a metronome.

Souls stamina and checkpoints with a gun in your hands, so the dodge is still the answer but the aim decides whether the dodge was needed.

Kinder than the first in every way that matters — the instant-death platforming is gone — and the map is still built to be read rather than followed.

Nothing fails quickly. A road laid in the first hour becomes unfixable in the twentieth, and that delay is the only real difficulty in it.

Runs are fast and deaths are total. Boss cells stack modifiers until a loadout that felt comfortable dies to two hits, and there is no difficulty setting hiding under them.