Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

Every death is your own fault and every run is a fresh cave. The systems interact thoroughly enough that it kills you in ways nobody has written down yet.

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

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.

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

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

A subscription racing simulator with licence classes, a safety rating and no assists worth the name — the difficulty is that it is not pretending.

Ki pulse turns stamina from something you spend into something you play in rhythm, and the game asks for it in the first hour without ever insisting you learn it.

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.