Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.