Ask for the shape of the challenge.

A parry game wearing a Souls coat: dodging alone will carry you for two hours and then stop working entirely.

The world is kinder than Dark Souls and the bosses are considerably meaner — almost all of the difficulty has moved into the fog gates.

Bullet-hell reflexes bolted to roguelike stakes — the two hardest things to hold simultaneously for two uninterrupted hours.

It punishes the instinct to retreat — the only way to get your health back is to keep hitting the thing that took it.

A directional parry replaces the roll as the answer to almost everything, and the game is markedly better once it clicks and markedly worse until it does.

A bullet hell with a generous dodge roll and completely ungenerous boss patterns. The unlock grind is doing double duty as the difficulty curve.

Aggressive rather than punishing — dying costs you almost nothing, so the walls are boss-shaped and the rest is spectacle.

It refuses to let you play it any other way — until the deflect is automatic, nothing else you have ever learned will help.

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.

Enormous and completely indifferent — most of its walls are optional, and it will never tell you which ones.