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…
Freeways is a great game that makes me want to tear my hair out.
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
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…
A lot of games made in the 90’s were difficult. But that’s before entitlement struck the gaming community and the “I need to beat this game in a weekend” turds were dictating how games turned out.
Me infodumping about way too much of my thoughts on this topic, possibly bad takes, probably will influence your answer if you haven't typed in anything
Okay thanks everyone so much! I… wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see in the replies, but I definitely had some other games in mind. I was thinking more along the lines of rhythm games (yes IIDX/SDVX I’m looking at you, no I still can’t consistently clear lvl17 on SDVX), since most rhythm game feature levels that are just downright humanly impossible… but I assume the JP-based rhythm games are way too niche for most people, and Guitar Hero/Just Dance aren’t too difficult in the grand scheme of things
I guess it makes sense that for many people the most difficult game would be some bizarrely difficult game from the 80s/90s since… I thought the rationale for making a video game challenging is to make it more replayable & create the feel of having more “content”? Games back then literally don’t have the technical ability to create a 40+ hrs unique gameplay, so I guess until roguelikes/roguelites became popular it is a good strategy to just make the game really hard (which also coincides with arcades’ need to make more money from ppl failing more). Which I guess makes From Soft games quite interesting since they are challenging despite having no lack of gameplay elements in the games themselves
And speaking of roguelikes/roguelites, I guess if people were to base the difficulty of a game on “how many people could win a run”, “how long does it take to git gud”, or “how consistently can a reasonably experienced player beat a run”, roguelikes/roguelites would top the charts on most difficulty rankings… which I find kind of funny
I also have a personal hypothesis that for any action-based games, people find games with more “abstraction”, i.e. the control scheme is more unintuitive or far-removed from the player, difficult. For example, a 90s platformer would feature you pushing buttons on a controller, which then feeds into your screen character moving while being influenced by game physics, which is an absurdly high amount of abstraction… whereas a game like Fruit Ninja has close to zero abstractions (you literally just swipe the fruit) and would probably be considered quite easy by most. Obviously doesn’t apply to non-action based games but I think they are the minority among all video games
But honestly, I know I’m asking for difficult games here, but I find even just the 1985 Super Mario Bros quite challenging (mostly because of the jank physics engine but more about that another time)… games from that era truly are something else. And this is speaking from someone who had 100%ed or otherwise fully cleared many popular roguelike/roguelites so…
Anyway I think the short conclusion I had is I should play a few retro games that I haven’t had a chance to try yet. Oh and traditional bullet-hells. Just for shits and giggles… thanks!
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…
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.
QWOP, by a wide margin. Reasoning: It’s free, go try it.
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.
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.
The original Prince of Persia
Those damn spike traps!
Battletoads
Ketsui or DOJ are up there too but futari is rediculous.
Okay that quickly went from “I think I can do this with some practice” to “what the actual fuck” to me… congrats on clearing the game
I haven’t touched classical bullet hell games since high school so… guess I should give them a try!
I’ve really only played Touhou in middle/high school… Imperishable Night was actually a really formative game for me, loved the OST and played quite a bit out of it. Fairly sure I’ve cleared this particular one on Easy, might have made to Stage 5/6 on Normal… Definitely didn’t clear Scarlet Devil on Normal because my motor skills were terrible back then
I should be able to clear Normal/Hard now that I’m older and more skilled. If I have the patience/time that is…
Edit: apparently I forgot how to do math and got the game release numbers wrong
That’s awesome! Loved Imperishable Night too, I played it so much along with Perfect Cherry Blossom and Subterranean Animism. As for Embodiment of Scarlet Devil it’s generally considered one of the harder games of the series
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.
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.
