Ask for the shape of the challenge.

A game about item literacy: the run is won or lost by whether you recognise a pickup you have never seen before.

Enormous and completely indifferent — most of its walls are optional, and it will never tell you which ones.

Driving it is a fraction of it. The car arrives on a setup that is wrong for the conditions, the game does not say so, and a lap that felt fine can be two seconds off because the tyre pressures were.

The difficulty is mostly geography — knowing which door to take is worth more than any weapon in the game.

The expansion where the series stops being polite: Master Rank monsters hit for most of your health bar and expect the matchup knowledge the base game let you skip.

The one that attacks your resources rather than your reflexes — your maximum health falls every time you die, and the ambushes are designed around you not knowing they are there.

The combat is the gentlest in the family and the systems are the cruellest — dying moves you to soul form at half health, and the game never says so.

A MOBA played from behind the character, so half your abilities have to be aimed and the other half have to be aimed while something is aiming at you.

It punishes the instinct to retreat — the only way to get your health back is to keep hitting the thing that took it.

Faster than Hollow Knight and less forgiving with it. Enemies crowd, healing is a commitment rather than a pause, and the early bosses assume reflexes the first game spent thirty hours building.