Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Pure execution with zero consequence: you will restart a seven-second track four hundred times and enjoy every one of them.

Frame-perfect demands wrapped in the kindest failure state in games — you will die two thousand times and each one costs you half a second.

One hit kills, restarts land in under a second, and momentum is mandatory — stopping to think is usually the thing that kills you.

You can finish it by mashing. The difficulty lives entirely in the gap between finishing it and playing it, and the game is happy to let you ignore that gap forever.

NES difficulty with modern checkpoints — and you can smash the checkpoints for gold, which is the game’s whole attitude in one mechanic.

Modern checkpoint generosity on the surface, with a completion layer underneath that wants every box and no deaths across a level built to cause both.

A platform fighter with three attack buttons and no movelists to memorise, which makes it the cheapest way to find out whether the genre is for you.

The demons are a resource puzzle solved at a hundred and twenty beats per minute; stop moving to think and you are already dead.

Parry-first combat with windows tight enough that blocking on reflex fails and blocking on rhythm works.

The single-player is genuinely welcoming; ranked is a decade of other people’s practice delivered eight frames at a time.