Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Depth and darkness rather than combat. It is careful never to tell you where to go, which is either the appeal or the wall depending on the player.

Every problem has a build that solves it, so the difficulty is whether you think to make one. The Depths are darker and meaner than anything in Breath of the Wild.

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.

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

The only game here that ships the site’s own thesis as a menu option — combat and puzzle difficulty are two separate settings, and the two are genuinely unrelated demands.

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.

Nothing in it is hard to do; almost everything in it is hard to find out that you can do.

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.

A build with no points where it matters hits walls it can neither talk nor shoot past. Hardcore mode adds logistics, and the Deathclaws north of Goodsprings teach direction before the game does.

Weakness targeting is the whole of combat, and the calendar is the real difficulty: a day spent wrong in November cannot be spent again.