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.

Slow, heavy and unforgiving — one bullet from someone you never saw ends thirty minutes, and the correct play is usually to not take the fight.

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.

The fastest time-to-kill of any battle royale, which makes positioning worth more than aim and mistakes worth almost nothing else.

It takes the one thing roguelikes normally give you — time to think — and puts it on a metronome.