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Counter Strike, Starcraft, Dota, Tetris (yes, really), each at the highest competitive level - going by skill ceiling.
Edit: Modern Tetris at the highest level looks absolutely inhuman. I have seen Triple T-Spins at absurd speeds.
Edit 2: You are pretty much physically unable to compete in these games by age 30 at the highest level.
Faster Than Light.
Seriously you could play ten games a day for a year and not even come close to winning, even if you're quite good at it.
Celeste is a truly difficult 2D platformer. VVVVVV follows behind. Metroid Dread is a cruel one.
F-ZERO X and GX are both racers with incredibly high skill ceilings. Which one is harder depends on what you're doing with the game. I'd argue GX has harder base gameplay, but X has harder speedruns.
I'll also mention Final Fantasy IV because it's shockingly difficult compared to the rest of the series. This one gave me a more game over screens than any of the others.
Metroid Dread still kinda ... bothers me. At the risk of sounding overly contentious, am I the only one who thought it was like a 7/10 action game and a 5/10 Metroidvania?
I won't go into it all now, but I feel like the difficulty spike is a knock-on from the lack of collectibles. While you can argue about the usefulness of previous collectibles in Metroid games, in Dread they've been pared down to Missile Tanks, Energy Tanks, and Power Bomb Tanks. To make discovering those limited things more valuable, they pumped up boss difficulty so you'd either have to come in with a sufficiently high stockpile or perform a counter.
I'm not sure if that's 100% accurate and I may be generalizing my own experiences too much, but otherwise there's just not really enough excuse for me to go out of my way and collect all those Missile Tanks unless I'm specifically going for a completionist run. Seeing yet another +5 Missile Tank tucked away somewhere just doesn't make me go, "Wow, I need to get there!" but increasing the boss difficulty to a point that requires it also makes it feel less optional? Anyone agree?
certified Dread disdainer
Ninja Garden 2 on Master Ninja mode. It's the hardest action game I've ever played. Non-stop Incendiary Shuriken ninjas, rockets, and mini bosses. You literally cannot stop moving, make any mistakes, and have to react in split seconds the entire time or you're dead. It's borderline impossible. Never again.
The classic arcade game Venture. Go ahead, make my day:
https://archive.org/details/arcade_venture#
Venture is a 1981 arcade game by Exidy. The goal of Venture is to collect treasure from a dungeon. The player, named Winky, is equipped with a bow and arrow and explores a dungeon with rooms and hallways. The hallways are patrolled by large, tentacled monsters (the "Hallmonsters", according to Exidy) who cannot be injured, killed, or stopped in any way. Once in a room, the player may kill monsters, avoid traps and gather treasures. If they stay in any room too long, a Hallmonster will enter the room, chase and kill them. In this way, the Hallmonsters serve the same role as "Evil Otto" in the arcade game Berzerk. The more quickly the player finishes each level, the higher their score. The goal of each room is only to steal the room's treasure. In most rooms, it is possible (though difficult) to steal the treasure without defeating the monsters within. Some rooms have traps that are only sprung when the player picks up the treasure. For instance, in "The Two-Headed Room", two 2-headed ettins appears the moment the player picks up the prize. Players die if they touch a monster or the corpse of a monster. Dead monsters decay over time and their corpses may block room exits, delaying the player and possibly allowing the Hallmonster to enter. Shooting a corpse causes it to regress back to its initial death phase. The monsters themselves move in specific patterns but may deviate to chase the player, and the game's AI allows them to dodge the player's shots with varying degrees of "intelligence" (for example, the snakes of "The Serpent Room" are relatively slow to dodge arrows, the trolls of "The Troll Room" are quite adept at evasion). The game consists of three different dungeon levels with different rooms. After clearing all the rooms in a level the player advances to the next. After three levels the room pattern and monsters repeat, but at a higher speed and a different set of treasures.
\
Released
1981
Army Moves on the ZX Spectrum. I tried that game on and off for years, and I think I beat the first level once.
This is a roguelike for people who find Nethack too easy. Then you have the option of layering in challenges like blind, pacifist, and vegan. Go ahead, try playing through as a blind, vegan, pacifist Tourist. I dare ya.
I always put the original Blaster Master on the NES up there.
It had no save capability at all, nor any codes to stop & restart later. When you sit down, you better be ready to do the whole 4+ hours in one playthrough (or just leave the NES on & walk away).
But the kicker was that once you got hit just a few times, you might as well restart. The gun (in person mode) would power down with each hit, and after a few hits, well, you just didn't have enough 'oomph' to kill the bosses. But the power-ups to get the gun were fairly sparse in the first place, so once you got hit, it wasn't like you could just retrace your steps & power up again.
Mildly interesting, at least to me, I understand it's been remastered for the Switch. It now has save points AND being hit doesn't reduce your gun's power. That would make it a completely different game. I'm be curious to check it out someday. If nothing else, I'm curious to see how much of it I remember. I suspect I can autopilot the first 2 hours, despite it being 40(?) years later.
Hardest to be the best at? Rocket League for sure
Seventh Cross Evolution for Dreamcast... It's just so cryptic and I honestly don't think the developers even know how it works.
Some insane individuals have attempted to speed run it and it still doesn't really make much sense.
QWOP, by a wide margin. Reasoning: It's free, go try it.
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.
I got all the way to the last level once... but never beat it. The lava level man.
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...
I'm glad you mentioned this! I completely agree... Which is kinda why I was asking about this in the first place. I was curious what others consider as objectively "difficult" for them, and I got my answer: my sense of "difficult" is very different from that of most Lemmy users...
fake difficulty
IMO I felt a lot of the answers pointed to games that are extremely high on the "cheap" scale... I mean yes cheap games are difficult, but yeah it does feel a bit artificial on the difficulty scale.
Which is also precisely why I didn't think of most platformers as among the hardest games. Like for example the original IWBTG; is it difficult? Sure it is, but a large part of it comes from the game being cheap AF... Someone with good platforming skills can clear every section with a few tries. And the higher difficulties just reduce the number of checkpoints, not actually making the game fundamentally more difficult... I mean there are genuinely difficult platformers but there are objectively more difficult games out there
so many kinds of difficulty
I'm actually surprised almost no one mentioned any type of PvP games or games that are primarily reliant on competing against other humans... they go insanely hard, but like how much of Street Fighter's difficulty is you being better than the other person vs just "know how the game works"?
If you want a game that not many people could beat
My favourite genre of games almost universally feature levels that probably fewer than 100 people across the world could beat (not counting customs), so... yeah.
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.
Then there's games like the original "pirates!". It has an anti cheat that would present itself as a simple question like "do you recognize whose pirate flag that is". The answer is in the booklet, and if you answer wrong nothing visible happens but the difficulty is cranked so high that the game becomes effectively unbeatable.
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 :]
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?
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 can't speak for ASCII mode. But DF is not hard, once you learn the game, unless you specifically go looking for a challenge.
The only real difficulty is just how much there is to learn about the game.
If you build defenses, never dig too deeply, and learn the basics of keeping your dwarves happy, you could play a fortress for hundreds of in game years. But that would get boring.
Having played a lot of Dwarf fortress in ascii mode as well as with tilesets, I agree with you. It's not especially difficult to make a successful fortress. However the game is definitely obtuse, even more so with the ascii graphics. Just figuring out what is happening on the screen and which combination of buttons to press to do what you want is quite difficult.
The steam release does some work to remedy the situation though.
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.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon with all 9 challenges active. I know there are a few people who have won the game with all 9, but my god is it hard.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon with nothing active is impossible for my dumb ass
I got good enough at it that I could win with no challenges about 2/3 of the time. Hit me up if you ever get stuck.
Thank you! I’m aways stuck. My longest run is level… five? I haven’t played for a few days since I realized I can use the clock button to wait a turn, letting foes come to me and not being the first attacked.
I have so much to learn.
I was thinking this as well most games when you beat them once you can pretty much do it every time. I still die a ridiculous amount in this game.
Such a good feeling when you finally win, though. The best I've managed is 3 challenges.
EU4...
I like most other Paradox games and I'm at least decent in them I'd say but EU4 just eludes me.
For the people unaware why EU4 is hard:
Take risk (the board game)
Now split the provinces till you have more than 3000 provinces. Then add variables to each region for culture, claims, trade good, trade power, buildings, development (in 3 aspects), the region they are part of, the trade node they are part of, religion, autonomy, unrest, devestation, temporary effects, and many many more.
Do the same for armies.
Add complicated politics, with royal marriages that allow countries to inherit other countries, war goals, casus belli requirements, etc.
Add colonization mechanics.
Add government mechanics (with many different variants for different governments ofcourse).
Add a compex Holy Roman Empire system and a complex system for the Chinese empire.
Add mechnics for different religions, including a pope and a religous war that can bring all of europe into a giant war.
Add a pool of diplomats, merchants, generals, and missionaries.
Now realise that I haven't played the game for ages, and this was just mechanics from the top of my head, and without what they added in the last few years.
EU4 is not hard due to required reflexes, muscle memory learning, or rythm feeling. It is just a lot of things to learn and to keep track of, woven into a super complicated simulation.
It's just so much stuff and I never knew what's actually important and what not
EU4 is pretty much exactly as difficult as being a real king in history just without any of the long term consequences. Paradox worked pretty hard to make this the case.
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.
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.
