Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Its difficulty is crowd control, not duels: the game throws groups and ranged attackers at you constantly, and the second world doubles the population.

A directional parry replaces the roll as the answer to almost everything, and the game is markedly better once it clicks and markedly worse until it does.

The mage hunts turn every boss into a chase across the map, which trades the first game’s clean duels for something closer to attrition.

The world is kinder than Dark Souls and the bosses are considerably meaner — almost all of the difficulty has moved into the fog gates.

Everything the 3D games do, minus a camera and plus a pit — the second axis of movement is gone, so a mistimed roll usually means falling somewhere worse.

Enormous and completely indifferent — most of its walls are optional, and it will never tell you which ones.

Heavy attacks with no cancel, instant-death platforming, and guilt fragments that tax you for dying exactly where you were already struggling.

Bullet-hell reflexes bolted to roguelike stakes — the two hardest things to hold simultaneously for two uninterrupted hours.

Short and dense, and almost nothing in it is labelled — you learn what an item does by eating it and finding out.

The difficulty is mostly geography — knowing which door to take is worth more than any weapon in the game.