Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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.

Document checking against a clock, where the rules change every morning and a mistake comes out of the family’s rent.

Frame-perfect demands wrapped in the kindest failure state in games — you will die two thousand times and each one costs you half a second.

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.

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.

The difficulty is logistics — weight, terrain and route planning — with combat as an interruption you are usually allowed to walk around.

Creature collection with a base-automation layer underneath it. The difficulty sliders are unusually honest about the fact that the grind is the game.

Level gating does the work encounter design would: a mercenary four levels above you is unkillable, and the game’s answer is more hours rather than a better plan.