Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Gentler than the first game and better taught. The co-op campaign is where the difficulty actually lives, because it needs two people to see the same solution at once.

The manual is written in a language you cannot read and is also the walkthrough. Combat is secondary to noticing what a page has been telling you for hours.

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

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.

No reflexes and no fights — you fail by having rolled badly on the question of who you decided to be twenty hours ago.