Ask for the shape of the challenge.

The purest execution test in the catalogue and one of the cheapest failures — nothing is lost when a run ends, which is exactly why people attempt the same map four hundred times.

The purest execution test on this list and also one of the gentlest, because the retry is faster than your regret.

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 finish it by mashing. The difficulty lives entirely in the gap between finishing it and playing it, and the game is happy to let you ignore that gap forever.

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.

One hit kills, restarts land in under a second, and momentum is mandatory — stopping to think is usually the thing that kills you.

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.