Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Legible in ten seconds and physical after ten minutes. The ceiling is not comprehension, it is whether your arms can still be in two correct places a second from now.

Frame-perfect demands wrapped in the kindest failure state in games — you will die two thousand times and each one costs you half a second.

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

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.

Momentum platforming with hitboxes that reward commitment and punish hesitation. Funky Mode exists because the late levels ask for a great deal.

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.

NES difficulty with modern checkpoints — and you can smash the checkpoints for gold, which is the game’s whole attitude in one mechanic.

A simulator with a full wall of assists in front of it, so the same corner can be a formality or a genuine test depending on what you left switched on.

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.