Ask Lemmy

QWOP, by a wide margin. Reasoning: It's free, go try it.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

The original Prince of Persia

Mushihimesama Futari was the hardest game I've ever played, and this is coming from someone who enjoys playing Touhou on Lunatic Mode. My god, the bullets, the sheer amount of bullets! I felt so proud of myself when I finally beat this boss.

SLASH'EM

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hardest to be the best at? Rocket League for sure

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

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.

Battletoads

Battletoads

Nina Gaiden 2. Bayou Billy.

Old games were brutal.

Jet set willie comes to mind.

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.
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Released
1981

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.

Iwbtg and all its successors and fan projects