Nameless Voice on 17/1/2019 at 22:34

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That's weird, I didn't find Chaos Reborn all that difficult. Having to redo a whole world if you run out of time was very annoying, though. I think that happened to me twice in the last world.

I'm not sure what's the actual hardest game I've played, but I can name a few that I can recall as being notably hard.

I just recently finished playing Vampyr, without killing any civilians. That leaves you ridiculously under-levelled to the point that most enemies kill you in 1-2 hits. Combine that with a boss-fight where random parts of the room keep shifting into deadly sunlight, and argh.

I seem to recall the original Far Cry on Realistic difficulty was rather frustratingly hard.

Games with stealth where one misstep leads to instant death can also count as very hard. Games like Commandos and Desperados, but even more so Evil Islands, where you can die repeatedly due to poor weapon damage rolls while trying to backstab.


All those probably don't hold a light to those hardcore platformers others have mentioned, though.

SubJeff on 18/1/2019 at 00:50

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Really? I don't remember it being that hard. It was so much fun though.


Shadow of the Beast 1 on Amiga was tougher imho.



This.

I'm playing God of War at the moment on the 2nd from hardest level. At this level the combat is fun and engaging, but it's tough. At the hardest difficulty it's just punishing and slow and you have to rely on cheese and a lot of luck. That's the line with the combat, to me.

I don't know how far I got with Supermeatboy but Electronic Super Joy is pretty good, not quite as hard I don't think, and has better music.

icemann on 18/1/2019 at 04:49

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When was Cannon Fodder hard? I used to play that game a fair bit, and never had any problems with it. I do recall though, that certain ports had some issues.

demagogue on 18/1/2019 at 09:24

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Well, let's tease out the different kinds of hard while we're at it.

There's twitch coordination hard like sticking tricky jump combinations in platformers (IWBTG) & 80s arcade games (Ghost and Goblins) and needling in and out with non-traditional kinds of attacks on an overpowered boss (Dark Souls). I knew about Commandos, Wizball, Green Beret too. (The hard C64 games I recall most were really small indies ... Willow Pattern, Rasputin, X15.) Uh, also bullet hell games (Touhou 15, Ketsui BL).

Then there's "I don't know what I'm really doing and the learning curve is a 20 story cliff" hard, like ultra realistic flight sims (DCS F-18C & Orbiter) and information-overload sims (Dwarf Fortress, X3, Victoria 2/Crusader Kings 2, Eve Online).

Related to that are games that aren't actually so hard if you know what you're doing but the game gives next to zero information and seems inscrutable and impossible until you figure it out. Figuring it out can often be most of the game itself (Shogun, Mu Cartographer, Royals). Also here are guess the verb / read the dev's mind / call our pay-for-answers phone service adventures (Space Quest, I'm looking at you).

Edit: You might add multiplayer FPSs where you have to play the thing for 5 years straight to get it down, and until you do, if you even pop your head out you're dead (Arma 2/3/Day-Z). IL-2 is this game for me I keep going back to. I can hardly take off and be in the air more than a few moments before I'm blasted apart.

Strategy games, like Rogue-likes, where you have to play the thing 100s of times before you understand what works (Shattered Pixel, FTL... My favorite Rogue-lite in this category is literally called Roguelight).

Anything where you have to memorize long lines of exactly timed actions (Dragon's Lair).

And for good measure, chess & Go (since these are played a lot online now; anyway they're still "games"). I got these learning apps for the chess openings, middle game, tactics, etc, and I do a little chess quiz every morning, and no matter how many years I've done it, I still feel like a complete newbie & get decimated in computer or online matches. Go is totally beyond my ken, but I know just by reading about it it's in that kind of category. I suppose Magic might also be in this category, but it doesn't feel like that to me I guess because I only play people as bad as me.

Malf on 18/1/2019 at 11:11

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I'd also add "Arcade Hard". Difficulty tweaked to ensure the average player stands little chance of getting very far on a single credit, ensuring they pump more coins in to the slot. Few modern games like this exist these days, but in the Eighties and early Nineties this difficulty was the predominant level for a lot of console games, 'cos developers took a long time to get out of the arcade mindset.
There's still quite a few indie games like this out there, but that level of difficulty has fallen out of fashion with both players and developers of more mainstream content.