Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Gentler than the first game and better taught. The co-op campaign is where the difficulty actually lives, because it needs two people to see the same solution at once.

The only thing gating progress is knowledge inside your own head, which makes it unspoilable once and unplayable if you look it up.

Hard for exactly as long as it takes the idea to arrive, then trivial — a game of realisations rather than of skill.

It is not hard to survive so much as hard to be told nothing and still choose the right direction.

Nothing in it is hard to do; almost everything in it is hard to find out that you can do.

Document checking against a clock, where the rules change every morning and a mistake comes out of the family’s rent.

Every problem has a build that solves it, so the difficulty is whether you think to make one. The Depths are darker and meaner than anything in Breath of the Wild.

The only game here that ships the site’s own thesis as a menu option — combat and puzzle difficulty are two separate settings, and the two are genuinely unrelated demands.

Depth and darkness rather than combat. It is careful never to tell you where to go, which is either the appeal or the wall depending on the player.

The only real pressure is the clock: every day you spend without a plan is a day the season quietly takes back.