Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Nothing in it is hard to do; almost everything in it is hard to find out that you can do.

A fishing game with an inventory puzzle and a night timer. Panic is the mechanic, and the punishment for giving in to it is deliberately mild.

No reflexes and no fights — you fail by having rolled badly on the question of who you decided to be twenty hours ago.

It plays itself for the first ten minutes, then asks whether you were paying attention to what you were building the whole time.

Class decides how hard the game is. Insanity turns every squad into a shield, armour and barrier check that punishes the wrong power loadout far more than bad aim.

Difficulty as an inventory problem: every fight you choose to take is ammunition you will not have for the one you did not see coming.

Difficulty is a slider, and the systems are exploitable enough that a determined player can break the game open by hour five. What is left is a very long walk.

The build carries the game. A netrunner or a sandevistan trivialises fights that a scattered stat spread makes unwinnable, and the difficulty setting only changes the numbers underneath that.

The shooting is forgiving and Dead Eye forgives the rest. The difficulty is deliberate friction — animations you cannot cancel, a horse you have to keep alive, and mission failure for stepping outside the script.

The genre’s shape at a fraction of its hostility — and the only one on this shelf that ships with a menu that will hand you a gun and skip the fight.