Ask for the shape of the challenge.

It refuses to let you play it any other way — until the deflect is automatic, nothing else you have ever learned will help.

A parry game wearing a Souls coat: dodging alone will carry you for two hours and then stop working entirely.

Enemies act during your recovery frames and refuse to wait their turn. The famous difficulty is the ordinary encounters, not the bosses.

A bullet hell with a generous dodge roll and completely ungenerous boss patterns. The unlock grind is doing double duty as the difficulty curve.

Three in-game days on a shrinking map, so the usual answer to a FromSoftware wall — go somewhere else and come back stronger — is the one thing the clock will not sell you.

The hardest thing here is unlearning defence — you cannot outlast anything, and the deflect window is the entire game.

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

Souls difficulty plus a fighting game’s input list plus a loot game’s spreadsheet, and none of the three is optional.

Counter-Strike’s stand-still-to-shoot rule with abilities layered on top, so a duel can be lost to a wall you did not know that agent could place.

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.