Ask for the shape of the challenge.

You choose which limb to cut off, which means every fight is a decision about what you want to be wearing afterwards rather than only about surviving it.

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

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

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

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.

A parry game wearing a Souls coat: dodging alone will carry you for two hours and then stop working entirely.

Every death ages you, and an old master dies in two hits. The run-level economy is what punishes learning a boss the slow way.

Two hits and you are in your underwear, three and the level restarts, and the game expects a second full loop before it will show you an ending.

A bullet hell with a generous dodge roll and completely ungenerous boss patterns. The unlock grind is doing double duty as the difficulty curve.

The gentlest soulslike on the shelf, largely because the AI companion it gives you will happily solo a boss you cannot beat.