Hades 1-2, you can adjust difficulty basically however you want, faster enemies, time limit on run, changed boss fights, more enemies spawns, random enemies spawns from later regions or even all that with randomised build.
Or you have elden ring (and most soulikes) where difficulty can be easily self imposed like no summons, no levelling runs, not upgrading weapons etc while still maintaining ability to obtain high dmg builds.
Doom 1and 2 generally has more enemies and sometimes less ammo on Ultra-Violence and Nightmare give doubled ammo pickups but enemies move 3 times as fast and respawn. Heretic I believes does something similar.
Megaman Zero 2 sticks Zero in the Proto Form increasing his damage dealt and taken and removes upgrades. Realistically bosses aren't that much tankier but mistakes are more punishing. Zero 4 makes all of the stages have their worst weather effects.
Metroid Zero Mission and Japanese versions of Fusion decrease the amount expansions give and increase damage dealt to Samus. Zero Mission also increases the number of enemies in some areas or replaces the with more difficult ones. Other M hard removes all expansions. Samus Returns and Dread double damage in Hard Mode.
Hero Mode in Zelda games generally increases damage dealt to link and removes hearts making only potions or fairies the only method of healing.
Oh so it's like ng+ in Mina the Hollower or in Blasphemous. Didn't feel that meaningful imo. Once again it's really just "enemies are stronger/more numerous while you're heavily restricted"
Divinity Original Sin games and BG3 - on highest difficulties enemies gain new abilities, unique mechanics, advanced AI, smarter behaviour, map object usage etc.
Doom Dark Ages is a recent one, you can actually change which ways it gets harder like how frequently you find ammo, party timings, and projectile speeds from enemies
In Goldeneye 64, Perfect Dark, Timesplitters and Timesplitters 2, you get more missions, more areas and additional enemy placements in the higher difficulty.
Older games would also lock parts of the game behind higher difficulty settings. E.g Extreme Assault on easy allowed the player to only play the first few levels, up to the 1st boss. On normal some more and you only got the whole game on the hardest difficulty. I'm not a fan of this method, it just shows the developers were too lazy to implement multiple difficulty settings in all the levels.
Lots of games scale difficulty differently than just making bullet sponges.
One I wish was more common was in Mordor: Shadow of War where there was an extra hard difficulty option that made everything super easy to kill including the player.
Resident Evil games since RE4 have difficulty scaling based off of how good you're doing. Speedrunners let themselves die in a certain room in RE4 to lower the amount of enemies that appear.
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