Forgot what made me think about this topic but I’ve been considering this for a week or two… Curious what you all think.
When I mean “hardest” “video game”, I mean whatever game that you find objectively more difficult than all other ones on the market, as long as it’s a video game. I guess exposure to different genres/types of games can influence the answer to this question a lot so… Hence I was curious about your rationale.
I have a pretty solid answer & rationale but I guess I shouldn’t share that in the main post to bias results…
Resident evil revelations on inferno difficulty is just unfair.
EU4…
I like most other Paradox games and I’m at least decent in them I’d say but EU4 just eludes me.
don’t starve adventure mode
this cute little game took me years to beat. souls games don’t even come close to it (and I love them very much)
it will throw a wrench into your plans at every step. the designers seem to have worked closely with psychiatrists to make you think you have figured it out only to destroy again and again and again
What makes it so hard is, that most of the problems you’re gonna face (starvation, sanaty, freezing, missing wappons/armor for battles) can be avoided/overcome easily only if you are prepared. Once the problems are here you often have no chance to deal with them when unprepared.
So after a while it becomes a constant danger evaluation in your head: There is an enemy… Fight or avoid? If i fight i might get hurt. Do i have time do find stuff to heal after the fight? And so on…
And adventure mode adds even more problems to the mix.
After writing this i realised that this sounds really stressful. But at the same time this is why i like this game so much :]
Dark souls, Bloodborne
There is one game, one level, that was so hard to beat that I just gave up and walked away, never to return. The stampede on Lion King from the SNES.
A lot of games from that era were epically hard; few games had a difficulty setting, a lot of tie-ins meant games looked and played polished but no effort was given to make a solid game, computing power meant there was usually only one way to complete a mission or level. However this was a game made for kids and that fucking game, that fucking level was simply bullshit.
Even if I somehow managed to outrun the stampede and climb the waterfall, I could never ever manage to beat Scar. Thank goodness for older siblings.
The Stampede?
I hardly ever beat Level 2…aka. the platformer version of “I Just Can’t Wait To Be King”.
And Level 3 has some annoyingly tough jumps too. I think The Stampede is level 4?
The only way most of us ever played the second half of the game is level select…
There are so many kinds of difficulty that this is hard to answer.
There’s fake difficulty, where the game is just being cheap. Some games are hard because their mechanics or controls are just janky.
Some games are easy to lock yourself out of the ending and not know it. Try the game from the start again!
There’s genuinely difficult games, but any time a game is difficult in a “fair” sense, there are people on the internet who’ll beat it with a guitar controller, or blindfolded, or without any power ups.
If you want a game that not many people could beat…I don’t think many people could beat Bokosuka Wars today…
Precisely. There are games where random factors like a particular loot drop, or doing well in an early battle thanks to random critical hits, or a good randomly generated starting point all determine if the game is reasonably beatable, or if you end up softlocked.
There are other games with certain, let’s says pranks, played on players with one hit kills that can only be avoided with foreknowledge. In modern games, at least these pranks are made shortly alter save points or there is a Dark Souls like way to regain equipment/progress. In a lot of older games, the player is forced to restart a big chunk of the game. At that point it becomes a test of patience rather than skill to replay the same level over and over.
QWOP, by a wide margin. Reasoning: It’s free, go try it.
Last Battle on the Sega Megadrive (Genesis). I believe there’s a handful of people who beat it, but it’s genuinely impossible for mere mortals.
And then there’s Spelunky 2
Fear and Hunger is a contender. If you aren’t aware, imagine a JRPG where you kill god at the end, but you don’t ever level up. Also the first enemy you fight is very likely to kill you, and has just as much of a chance of doing so on your 100th playthrough. Oh, and you start from the beginning every time you die.
Fear and Hunger seemed like an interesting game, until I found out the true horrors of what some of the enemies do to you, and that put me off. If you think getting your head pecked off by the Crow Mauler is bad, what if I told you that rape is a highly recurring theme in that game?
I haven’t played it myself, but I understand there are mods to remove nudity at least, and I would expect the sexual violence as well. That would be a requirement for me to try it.
Such a mod does exist, and I’d be shocked if it didn’t also remove any scenes of sexual violence.
An example of what I mean is the Harvestman, which the video doesn’t fully explain and for good reason. He not only begins the fight creepily caressing members of the party, but from the third turn onwards his attack becomes a coin flip.
Fail it, and it’s an instant game over, where you’re treated to a cutscene where the Harvestman breaks your limbs then fists you to death.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon with all 9 challenges active. I know there are a few people who have the game with all 9, but my god is it hard.
Freeways is a great game that makes me want to tear my hair out.
Just try to play Dwarf Fortress, and you’ll drop any other opinion on this subject. Especially the ASCII version of the game, not the fancy graphical one.
I tried to get into this game because I like Rimworld but damn is it so hard to learn. I couldn’t even get past the tutorial.
Hey, at least there is a tutorial. When I started, there wasn’t.
Adventure Mode is even more difficult within Dwarf Fortress: I once had a fresh character start in a village and he died from blood loss while I was grinding levels by wrestling salmon in a nearby river, and it bit my characters toe off.
That’s the kind of stories only DF writes. No other game comes even close to this.
I have to admit that I have never done adventure mode, and can’t do it now as I am to busy with my other hobbies to play anything but a quick round of solitaire. But DF will always hold a special place in my heart, and I hope I can one day play the courage 1.0 version of it.
The original Prince of Persia
Those damn spike traps!
Toss up between RC Pro-Am and Ninja Gaiden on the NES. I beat them both and they were both a real bitch. So, so many times I got to the final race or stage and couldn’t do it… so you start all over from the beginning.
Games like that don’t exist anymore.
Probably some of the old Nintendo games. Silver surfer is an extremely difficult bullet hell. Battletoads required insane memorization and timing, pretty sure you had to act before the game even told you in some places.
