Ask for the shape of the challenge.

A build with no points where it matters hits walls it can neither talk nor shoot past. Hardcore mode adds logistics, and the Deathclaws north of Goodsprings teach direction before the game does.

Document checking against a clock, where the rules change every morning and a mistake comes out of the family’s rent.

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.

Weakness targeting is the whole of combat, and the calendar is the real difficulty: a day spent wrong in November cannot be spent again.

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

The difficulty is logistics — weight, terrain and route planning — with combat as an interruption you are usually allowed to walk around.

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.

Cover disintegrates, healing means walking into the fight to collect it, and two optional bosses sit several tiers above everything around them.

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.

Every problem has a build that solves it, so the difficulty is whether you think to make one. The Depths are darker and meaner than anything in Breath of the Wild.