Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

The town is gone, so there is no bank of spare heroes to absorb a bad decision — a run is four people and every relationship between them is a mechanic.

Armour has to be stripped before any control lands, surfaces do more damage than swords, and the game explains neither. Act two is where under-levelled parties stop entirely.

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.

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.

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.

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

A city builder where the scarce resource is time and every law you sign is unrepealable. The storm arrives on schedule whether or not the city is ready.

Classic mode makes every death permanent, and the calendar decides months in advance who will be strong enough to survive. Maddening turns recruitment into its own strategy layer.