Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Two players, one screen, no difficulty setting. The hard part is coordination, and the game restarts you both a second after it goes wrong.

Beautiful and forgiving right up to the escape sequences, which convert a gentle metroidvania into a memorisation test with no warning at all.

Combat is scored on the beat and will still let you win off it. Playing to the rhythm is the difference between a rank and a mess.

A blockbuster that expects to be finished, with the actual demands parked in optional bosses you can walk past without the story noticing.

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.

A lullaby until the drop speed crosses whatever your reading threshold happens to be, at which point it becomes a pure reflex test with a very good soundtrack.

It is not hard to survive so much as hard to be told nothing and still choose the right direction.

Every individual mechanic is trivial; the difficulty is entirely another human being who cannot hear what you are shouting.

Swinging is forgiving by design. The spikes are the crowded arena fights on Ultimate, where one unblocked rifle burst is most of a health bar.

Rewind, a braking line and drivatar tuning let anyone finish anything. The difficulty is entirely opt-in, and turning the assists off makes it a different game.