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…
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.
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.
Resident evil revelations on inferno difficulty is just unfair.
QWOP, by a wide margin. Reasoning: It’s free, go try it.
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.
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.
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
Ketsui or DOJ are up there too but futari is rediculous.
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!
Crypt of the NecroDancer.
There are three big challenge characters in the base game:
- Aria can only use the starting dagger, no other weapons. She has only one hit point. And she dies if the player ever misses a beat.
- Monk dies if he picks up gold. All enemies drop gold, even ones that normally wouldn’t, which turns the game into a routing puzzle where you must never step on squares that an enemy previously died on.
- Bolt plays the whole game at double tempo.
Once you have beaten these three challenge characters, plus the other six easier ones, your next task is All Chars Mode. Beat the game nine times in a row, once with each character. If you die, you must start the whole marathon over.
Beating that unlocks the tenth character, Coda. Coda combines the restrictions of Aria, Monk, and Bolt all at once.
And if you can do that, the final achievement is Lowest of the Low, which requires you to beat All Chars Mode without collecting any items.
The DLC adds a few more hard characters, and another achievement for an extended 13 Character Mode, but they aren’t considered to be as hard as Coda or Lowest of the Low. A single digit number of players have stacked the challenges for Coda low% and 13chars low%.
I was also thinking of NecroDancer. For most players (including myself) the game is already difficult without these extra challenges.
Iwbtg and all its successors and fan projects
Hardest in a different way than you probably mean for me would be This War Of Mine. One of the first missions you basically have to stab an old man and his wife after you broke into their house. It’s rough.
The games you have to grind for 1000 hours just to have anything worthwhile. I got to be able to turn it on and go Brrap Brrap Pew Pew!
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.
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…
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 original Prince of Persia
Those damn spike traps!
