Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

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.

Gentle to look at and quietly ruthless to score — the tile you place carelessly on turn ten is the one that ends the run four hundred turns later.

Tool-based puzzles that stay scrupulously fair, while the optional stars quietly assume you will break the rules the tutorial spent an hour teaching.

The only thing gating progress is knowledge inside your own head, which makes it unspoilable once and unplayable if you look it up.

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

The rules are the puzzle, so being stuck feels less like failing and more like simply not having had the thought yet.

There is no fail state, only the quiet friction of guessing where somebody else would keep their mugs.

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

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.