Harder than a soft right-hook from Kimbo (on PCP and cilantro)
The best way to prove you’re the hardest of the hardcore gamers is to play tough games. If it doesn’t have you slamming your controller and yelling four-letter words, it’s not worth playing. Most games nowadays are easy. Too easy for a tough-as-nails Gamer such as yourself, so you go online and you look up lists of the toughest games ever, only to find the same few games repeated over and over again.
I’ve mentioned in a few reviews that I like tough games. If I can breeze through a game just pressing buttons like a chimp, I’m going to get bored. Then there are games that try to pose a challenge, but when you try to play them with any sort of skill, they buckle under the pressure and don’t provide anything fun.
The other end of the spectrum are games that are needlessly hard or just annoying to play. Bad, poorly designed games with terrible controls, bad enemies or mechanics designed to waste your time. These don’t get made much anymore. This kind of bad hard game was replaced by the bad easy game. If you couldn’t tell, these kinds of games suck.
The ones in this list are tough, but good. In my opinion, at least.
A few rules for this list:
I have to have played the games. No “I’ve heard this is hard”. If it were like that, I could just copy someone else’s list and be done with it.
These are games I like. I can’t list a game that I dislike or that I think sucks. These are games that I enjoy playing.
No meme games. No I Wanna Be the Guy or Cat Mario. The type of game where you just die over and over and memorize traps.
The games here provide a constant challenge. There are some games, like Wanted Dead, that front load their challenge. Once you get a handle on the controls and how the game flows, it becomes kind of easy, and it doesn’t challenge you in any novel ways afterwards. The games here are tough from beginning to end. If a game is only hard because of one difficulty spike, it’s not included here.
No alternate difficulties I could easily list a few games with the caveat of “only on their hardest difficulty”. Halo isn’t very hard, but on Legendary, it’s a pain in the neck and genuinely challenging. Most of the time. The games here are played on their base difficulty. If they have a difficulty selection, their placement here is dictated by the difficulty closest to a normal mode.
No challenge runs. Some might not consider getting SSS ranks in Devil May Cry 3 a challenge run, but it’s an extraneous way of playing. I’m counting playing to clear the game. Same thing with high scores in shooting games. I’m considering how hard it is to get from the start of the game to the end playing normally.
I’ll try to avoid listing games everyone else has mentioned. No point in making a list if I repeat what’s already been said.
Idiot clause: Just because I exclude a game doesn’t mean it’s easy or bad. It might be that I haven’t played it, or I don’t think it should be mentioned. I like Sifu, and think it’s a tough game, but it’s on everyone else’s list and I’ve played much harder games. I call this the idiot clause because you can’t say one thing on the Internet without some idiot claiming you said the opposite.
The rules for the list are longer than the list itself.
1. Stranger of Sword City
How can this be tough? It’s a turn-based RPG. Just grind, bro. Stay in the same place fighting enemies for an hour and get bigger numbers, bro.
Stranger of Sword City is a first-person dungeon crawler where you explore dungeons, have fun adventures and get your entire party turned into red paste. It’s one of those games where enemies hit really hard and you just die. They can also poison you, or give you other status effects that kill you. Basically everything is out to kill your party.
Since this is an RPG, you can just revive your fallen party members with items or spells, right? No. In Stranger of Sword City, you mus re-animate them at the base. This takes several in-game days, which means you’re left without a party member for that time. You can substitute them with someone else, but that brings its own challenges. The replacement is usually of a lower level than whoever they’re replacing, and they might not be of the same class. Losing an important party member might make you reconsider your plans, and change your entire play style for some time.
If it were only about getting killed all the time, this would be a meme game and it wouldn’t be on the list. The game gives you all the tools you need to prevent death. Multiple tactical options like powerful defensive spells, buffs, items that raise resistances and barriers. With some foresight, careful mana management and playing carefully, you can overcome any challenge thrown at you.
The game does a good job of making you want to ignore those carefully laid out plans. You might want to be very cautious and play taking the least risks possible, but then you’d miss out on better equipment, or if you play more offensive and risk taking damage, you can finish off a strong opponent faster. This constant push and pull of risk and reward ensures you can’t turtle all the time and hope for the best. You need to look the enemy in the eye, take a stand, then get hit by a death spell that knocks out two thirds of your party.
I’ve heard there are tougher dungeon crawlers out there, but I haven’t tried them yet.
2. Deadlock
You know Dota2? That one game where ten characters fight over limited resources using a ton of weird magic abilities? Where you have to learn some esoteric series of steps like some obscure dance to keep your teammates from yelling at you. You got your Battle Fury thirty seconds late, so it’s your fault that your midlaner went 0 and 5 in the laning phase, because you didn’t rotate to gank his lane. Now he’s yelling something in Spanish into the mic, which you can’t understand, but he sounds really angry, and from the context you can tell that “puto” is something you are, and it’s bad, and you should stop being a puto. How do you do that? Well, you have to stack your camps and optimize your farming patterns to get your items on time. OBVIOUSLY. Puto.
Now take that, and fuse it with a third person shooter with complex movement. Then add another character to each team, just for funsies. That’s Deadlock. The game that makes DoTA2 seem streamlined.
Instead of clicking around a map to move, you control your character in full 3D with the WASD keys. Now, you have to aim your attacks instead of clicking on the enemy. You no longer have a bird’s eye view of the battlefield, so you can get blindsided from multiple angles. The most complicated movement in DoTA2 is using the Blink Dagger and jumping around once every few seconds, or playing as a jumpy hero like Storm Spirit. Deadlock ups the ante by giving you slides, wall hops, double jumps, punches, parries. You can hop off a wall and punch in mid-air to gain some distance then jump into a slide down a slope to gain momentum. If it were just a shooter, it’d be a satisfying and feature-complete game, but then it has an entire MOBA attached to it like a conjoined twin.
This isn’t a shooter with light MOBA elements. It’s a full-blown, honest-to-God MOBA, with teammates yelling slurs at you in broken English and everything. Complicated farming patterns? Check. Make sure you get the camps, but don’t farm so hard that you starve your teammates. Tons of items? Check. Keep an eye on your opponent’s items, so you know what they’re capable of. You might be farming in your lane, impressed at your souls per minute, when suddenly the enemy Dynamo falls from the sky like a vengeful piece of hail and casts his ultimate on you, and you die. You didn’t know he had Majestic Leap? Too bad. Push the lane out, but not too much since that might make the enemy team rotate to where you are, getting them close to mid, and your team is trying to sneak a mid boss. You don’t know this, because they didn’t say anything. In fact, the only one who knew you were getting mid boss was your under-leveled Haze who thought she could solo it, only to get ambushed by the enemy team. You should have known that would happen, but you didn’t. Because you’re a puto.
I love the game, but it’s not something I can play too often. A match of DoTA2 feels like working a second job. A game of Deadlock can take years off your life. The same complexity that makes it fun, interesting and endlessly replayable, is the same complexity that gives you a headache if you play too long. It puts a mental strain on you like a MOBA does, where you have to keep track of fifty different things at once, while giving you the same physical fatigue of a mechanically-demanding shooter, where you have to do 300 actions per minute. It’s fun (if you’re into that sort of thing), but man is it tough.
3. La Mulana
The premise of La Mulana is simple. It’s a 2D metroidvania where you play as Professor Lemeza, a legally distinct Indiana Jones. You explore ruins, fight monsters and solve the most insane puzzles ever. There aren’t a lot of mechanics, no crafting, no advanced movement tech. It’s a very restrained game. You want to know more about the puzzles? Ah, right. I should elaborate.
The puzzles in La Mulana are somewhere between Moon Logic and “what color is my underwear?”. Moon logic is when a puzzle’s solution is something completely nonsensical. What color is my underwear are puzzles where the solution is incredibly simple, but it’s only something the developer would know, such as the color of his underwear. There’s one riddle where you have to kneel in an exact spot to trigger something. Simple enough. There’s another where you have to stand on a vase, then press down to go into it, Super Mario Bros 2 style, and teleport. The thing is, this is the only time you can enter a vase like this. It never happens again. Think those are still too easy? Well, there’s one where you have to go into one area in one level and move off-camera, where you will then enter a completely different area you didn’t know was connected to it, to access an off-limits room.
To be fair, the game gives you all the hints to complete the puzzles. The game is littered with little stone tablets that have vague things on them. These can be the solution to a puzzle in the same room, or maybe in the same world, or maybe the solution to a riddle in a completely different world eight hours later. If you write down every single clue and review it, you can figure them out. The “What color is my underwear” comes from interpreting the vague hints and realizing one of them is saying “Go to this very specific part of a level and attack a part of the background”.
What’s so tough about that? Just get a guide. Problem solved. You beat the game, right? Wrong. This is primarily a platformer. A very brutal platformer. Even if you know the solution to each puzzle, you have to get to it, fighting the endlessly respawning enemies and jumping across gaps. Not to mention fighting the game’s soul-crushing bosses. You can’t outsmart La Mulana.
This all might make the game sound like a load of artificial difficulty, but the game is really fun. For some people. This is a game that you either love or hate, and I love it. I think it’s one of the greatest games ever made, if you can get past the nonsense. Its sense of wonder, exploration and discovery is unmatched. I had to use a guide for some of the puzzles, but it was a hint-based guide that helped nudge me in the right direction, not one that spoiled everything outright. Even then, I solved a ton of these puzzles on my own, and the sense of satisfaction is still unmatched by most games. If you like borderline sadistic games, then give La Mulana a try.
I didn’t do the optional Hell temple, though. Even I have my limits.
4. Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou
This is a bit of a cop-out. Dai Ou Jou is tough, don’t get me wrong, but I’m using it as a catch-all for a lot of shmups in general. I’m only singling out DDPDOJ because it fits the list better. Disregarding the one credit clear or getting a high score using the incredibly strict chaining system, it’s still a tough game just to get through. Every screen is covered in projectiles, bosses have crazy patterns, there’s something shooting at you on every pixel. It’s madness, but it’s wonderful to look at. With some training, you can learn to see the gaps in the bullet patterns and weave through them, which feels fantastic. Then right after that one dodge you get trapped in another pattern and die.
This applies to a lot of shmups. They’re similar in how they play; mostly focused on dodging bullets and moving. What differentiates them is their enemy design, density, patterns and extra systems. The other thing that they share is their brutal difficulty.
If you look up a list of “the most difficult games”, chances are you’ll see Ikaruga mentioned. Ikaruga is a great game, and it’s tough, but I don’t know why it keeps showing up in those lists. Dodonpachi is a lot more difficult, so is Battle Garega. Heck, I’d consider “beginner friendly” shmups like ESP Galuda and Mushihimesama to be on the same level of difficulty as Ikaruga, so I don’t know why they pick that one. Maybe because it’s the most well known example of the genre that modern critics know of. I’m pretty sure the people who make those lists don’t play the games they mention. If they did, they would list a shmup other than Ikaruga. They’d stop putting Cuphead in the same list with Contra, too.
Arcade games in general are extremely difficult. I was tempted to stuff this list full of arcade games, since they’re still significantly harder than anything released in the past decade, but then it would just be a list of arcade games. Final Fight is harder than Sekiro. Metal Slug is tougher than Cuphead.
5. Ninja Gaiden 2
Truth be told, I could have put any Ninja Gaiden here. The NES ones are brutal, Ninja Gaiden Black is extremely difficult, Ninja Gaiden 3 is designed to induce madness and we don’t talk about the other one, because we’re discussing good games. Ninja Gaiden 2 happens to be my favorite out of the bunch, and it’s also the kind of game that makes you slam your head through a wall. In the best way possible.
What makes this game so difficult is also a major factor in why it’s so good: The enemies hate you. You’d think Ryu was walking around constantly shouting slurs with how the enemies jump at him. They’re vicious to the point of parody.
The moment you get control of Ryu in the first chapter, you’re already getting attacked. You run away from the assailants, hoping they’d leave you alone, but they don’t. They start throwing shuriken at you. They run up to you at inhuman speeds to try to stab you. The few frames when they’re not actively slashing, they’re getting into position to attack. You cut an enemy’s leg off and you think you’re safe, but no. That just made him angrier. Now they go full kamikaze and explode, trying to take you down with them. The werewolf enemies throw their own limbs at you, mage ninjas are constantly teleporting and throwing fireballs, and don’t even get me started on the incendiary shuriken. If there’s an entity other than Ryu on screen, it wants to kill him.
This makes the combat a lot more engaging than in other action games. I love Devil May Cry, but the enemies there are pushovers compared to the ones in Ninja Gaiden. They let you breathe. They don’t come at you with the hatred of 3,000 Hitlers. They let you combo them, launch them up in the air and style on them. The ones in Ninja Gaiden don’t care that you’re trying to pull off a cool combo, the only thing they want to pull off is your head. Yeah, I know they’re tougher in Dante Must Die, but that’s Very Hard mode. Ninja Gaiden 2 is like that at base difficulty.
This leads to a lightning fast back-and-forth between the player and the enemies. You’re constantly reacting to their offense while trying to keep yours going. It’s not like in other games where you block and parry waiting for your moment to strike. In Ninja Gaiden 2, you have to be the one to make the opening. You strike first, then jump out of the way of an attack, only to land and deliver an instant counter.
The game demands a lot from the player while also providing all the tools to succeed. Even while facing seemingly unfair odds, the game’s systems rise to meet the challenge. Ryu’s move set and his abilities can be used to take down entire rooms of ninjas spamming explosives.
Bonus:
Gungrave GORE
When it comes to being tough, no one can beat Gungrave GORE. No one can beat it because no one can stay awake during it. This game is so boring I can’t tolerate it for more than twenty minutes at a time. I can sit here and rant about how hard these games are, but I still play them. I willingly engage with them for the sake of entertainment and enjoyment. With Gungrave, I can barely finish a single mission before I’m looking for other things to do. I start a level and doze off and the next thing I know I’m in the kitchen doing dishes. If I need to do something tedious like clean the shower or do some yard work, I boot up Gungrave and I get a surge of motivation. Pulling out weeds in the mid-day sun? What a blast! I can’t wait to get bit by gnats and other assorted critters.
League of Legends:
Deadlock might be hard, but League of Legends is brutal. Sure, you need to get an invitation for Deadlock, but they’re giving them away. After that, you start the game and you’re in. You’re playing the game. You can pick a character and go shootin’ with your friends. It’s not that simple in League of Legends.
Want to jump into a match after installing the game? Woah there, bucko! Slow down. You’re doing 60 in a school zone, kid. Start with the obligatory tutorial. It’s long, and it barely teaches you anything, but hey you need to do it otherwise you’ll be completely lost. Now that you’ve finished your tutorial, you can go ahead and jump right into the game. You saw Arcane, right? So you want to play Jinx. She’s really cool. Can’t wait to bring Jinx’s Harley Quinn-inspired brand of chaos to the enemy team. That would be cool, if you could pick her. She’s locked. If she’s not in this week’s free character rotation, you’re out of luck, buddy. Pick one of the ten available. Look you can pick Malzahar. Who’s that? I don’t know either, just pick him. There’s also something about runes and summoner spells. What do those mean? Who knows. You just know that everyone you’ve seen playing this game takes flash and something else for their spells. You click on the summoners and- what’s this?- flash is locked. You need to play more games and level up so you can actually choose it! You can’t even jungle in your first few games because Smite is locked, so you have to do some weird two double lane configuration that doesn’t exist.
The game’s new player onboarding is actually hell. Literally the bad place. When you boot up League for the first time, you get poked in the back by a trident. There’s no way to unlock stuff, everything is gated, there’s a ton of extraneous nonsense to come to grips with before you even start a match. It’s insanity. You’re better off playing Deadlock blind and trying to learn how to aim and shoot while memorizing the 32 active items in the shop.
If you manage to ignore all of that, you go midlane with Malzahar only to find your Vayne already at mid. He’s really angry because you didn’t pick the right runes, so he’s stealing your minions. He calls you a puto.
Conclusion
There you have it. Five games that I consider to be really tough, but really good. I wholeheartedly recommend every game on this list, except for the ones I explicitly mentioned as being terrible. I would assume that’s a given and doesn’t need to be said, but there are people out there with an internet connection and an IQ below 60.
I can’t believe that I made it through an entire discussion on hard games without mentioning Dark Souls! Wait- shit...
Lmao fucking loved this list! Picked up Ninja Gaiden 2 a few months back and I'm genuinely scared to play it.