Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Every puzzle teaches a rule it refuses to state, and the island is perfectly happy to let you stand in front of a panel you have no vocabulary for yet.

No luck and no reflexes: every loss is a chess problem you were shown in full and got wrong anyway.

Thermodynamics as a colony sim. The base that runs beautifully for forty cycles fails on the sixtieth because the heat had nowhere to go.

The failure state is a confused kind of boredom — you will rule for two centuries before you work out what you were supposed to be doing.

Division templates, supply and production efficiency are the game, and none of them are on screen when you start. The front line is only ever a symptom.

Hundreds of hours of interlocking systems with a mid-game crisis on a timer. Most losses happen fifty in-game years before anybody notices them.

A storyteller AI aims raids at whatever you are worst at, and mood is a second economy that collapses faster than the defensive one.

Not difficult so much as undocumented — everything that kills you was perfectly legible, in a menu you did not know existed.

It barely tests your hands at all; it tests whether you can walk away from a dungeon you have already paid for.

A simulated ecosystem that has no interest in being fair. Movement takes twenty hours to feel deliberate, the rain cycle takes back anything you did not bank, and nothing is explained at any point.