Ask for the shape of the challenge.

The shield parry replaces Eternal’s resource juggling, so the demand moves from managing three meters to reading incoming attacks. The difficulty sliders are unusually granular about which of those you want.

Five stances that each want a different defensive habit, on a difficulty curve gentle enough that you can reach the end still using the first one.

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

An action game wearing horror, and the resource economy is the horror. Ammunition is the real health bar, and the game quietly adjusts how much of it you find based on how well you are shooting.

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.

A metroidvania that fights with summoned spirits on cooldowns rather than a weapon, so encounters are about rotation and spacing instead of stamina.

Inventory management doing the work of a difficulty setting. Village of Shadows expects the route knowledge of a second playthrough and does not pretend otherwise.

You can save anywhere for a resource cost, which turns the escape sequences into a planning problem: no soul links means no checkpoints, and the game does not hand them back.

Give Me God of War removes the stagger the whole combat loop leans on, and turns the optional Valkyries into the fights people put the controller down over.

Hard in a way that always moves forward: you lose the run but never the hour, because failure is the currency the next attempt is bought with.