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zlatiah @lemmy.world

What is the hardest video game(s) in your opinion, why, and what other games are you comparing against to make this conclusion?

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...

92 comments

  • 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.

      • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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%.

  • Army Moves, Navy Moves, or any other old Dynamic Software game. You'd have to be very skilled to get out of the first stage.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Out of the games I've played, OSU. I am pretty average at rhythm games where it's like Project Sekai or the Miku Diva style games where all you have to do it wait and click a button or tap somewhere specific at a fixed location on screen, but I absolutely suck at the whole move the mouse and click thing. Just as bad with mouse as when I tried with my beginners tablet.

    Most other games I play anymore are games I know I'm at least decent at, so I don't have many games I'd consider the hardest or even to compare those too. Though, while writing this and thinking about it, I'd say I might compare OSU to Vib-Ribbon in general, default songs or not, and possibly even give it a close second for difficulty. And that's despite it being more of a wait and click type rhythm game in my eyes.

  • This is one is genre specific, but Caesar 3. I love city builders and have played them for as long as they've existed. I've learned all the little tricks and systems of the ones I've played, exploiting esoteric mechanics and optimizing my little utopias and creating epic, sprawling empires that far exceed every metric asked of me. That said, Caesar 3 is a challenge I still relish after (oh wow, has it really been) 25 years. It's the only city builder where the "peaceful" branch in the story is harder than the "wartime" scenarios. I revisited it recently wondering if I was just missing something back when I was younger, but nope. On the harder levels it asks you to sustain larger and larger populations with increasingly limited resources, and reaching the level of getting patrician housing (only achieved with sustained, stable access to literally every amenity) is extremely difficult but oh so satisfying. Every other city builder I've played, I barely have to think about every house becoming the top tier, but in Caesar 3 it's impressive if even a single block achieves it. It stands out even now after so many new entrants into the genre. Hell, it's still worth playing haha.

  • Army Moves on the ZX Spectrum. I tried that game on and off for years, and I think I beat the first level once.

  • 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!

92 comments