Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Bullet-hell reflexes bolted to roguelike stakes — the two hardest things to hold simultaneously for two uninterrupted hours.

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

Every death ages you, and an old master dies in two hits. The run-level economy is what punishes learning a boss the slow way.

The world is kinder than Dark Souls and the bosses are considerably meaner — almost all of the difficulty has moved into the fog gates.

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.

A directional parry replaces the roll as the answer to almost everything, and the game is markedly better once it clicks and markedly worse until it does.

The movement is the skill ceiling and nothing in the game mentions it — the players beating you are using techniques that were never taught, only tolerated.

Building is a second game bolted to the first, played at a speed that looks like a bug, and the mode that removes it is where most people should start.

Nothing but boss fights, each a bullet hell and a duel at once. Phases checkpoint until the late ones, which do not.