Ask for the shape of the challenge.

A card game that keeps changing what kind of game it is. The difficulty is noticing which rules you are allowed to break, and when.

Kinder than the first in every way that matters — the instant-death platforming is gone — and the map is still built to be read rather than followed.

Straightforward once you find the right weapon, and famously obtuse about its second half — the difficulty is knowing that half exists at all.

Tool-based puzzles that stay scrupulously fair, while the optional stars quietly assume you will break the rules the tutorial spent an hour teaching.

Aim is only half of it — the generation means the run you get may simply not contain the item you needed, and the game will not tell you that either.

Poker hands as a scaling problem. The ante climbs faster than a fair deck can, so a run lives or dies on whether the multiplier joker you needed ever appeared in the shop.

Nothing fails quickly. A road laid in the first hour becomes unfixable in the twentieth, and that delay is the only real difficulty in it.

It barely tests your hands at all and is one of the most punishing games here anyway: saving takes ten seconds at a fixed terminal and can be interrupted, so every stretch of progress is a bet you are choosing to hold.

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

Death drops your gear where you died, and where you died is usually the swamp. The stamina economy keeps fights short and losing them expensive.