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

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

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.
I got all the way to the last level once... but never beat it. The lava level man.

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...

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.
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.

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.

Adventure Mode is even more difficult within Dwarf Fortress: I once had a fresh character start in a village and he died from blood loss while I was grinding levels by wrestling salmon in a nearby river, and it bit my characters toe off.
- That's the kind of stories only DF writes. No other game comes even close to this.
  
  I have to admit that I have never done adventure mode, and can't do it now as I am to busy with my other hobbies to play anything but a quick round of solitaire. But DF will always hold a special place in my heart, and I hope I can one day play the courage 1.0 version of it.
I can't speak for ASCII mode. But DF is not hard, once you learn the game, unless you specifically go looking for a challenge.

The only real difficulty is just how much there is to learn about the game.

If you build defenses, never dig too deeply, and learn the basics of keeping your dwarves happy, you could play a fortress for hundreds of in game years. But that would get boring.
- Having played a lot of Dwarf fortress in ascii mode as well as with tilesets, I agree with you. It's not especially difficult to make a successful fortress. However the game is definitely obtuse, even more so with the ascii graphics. Just figuring out what is happening on the screen and which combination of buttons to press to do what you want is quite difficult.
  
  The steam release does some work to remedy the situation though.
I tried to get into this game because I like Rimworld but damn is it so hard to learn. I couldn't even get past the tutorial.
- Hey, at least there is a tutorial. When I started, there wasn't.

The original Prince of Persia

Those damn spike traps!

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.

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!
- How does Touhou on Normal look to you?
Ketsui or DOJ are up there too but futari is rediculous.

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.

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.

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.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon with nothing active is impossible for my dumb ass
- I got good enough at it that I could win with no challenges about 2/3 of the time. Hit me up if you ever get stuck.
I was thinking this as well most games when you beat them once you can pretty much do it every time. I still die a ridiculous amount in this game.
- Such a good feeling when you finally win, though. The best I've managed is 3 challenges.

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.

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.

Battletoads

Gosh damn fuckin bike level

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.

Metroid Dread still kinda ... bothers me. At the risk of sounding overly contentious, am I the only one who thought it was like a 7/10 action game and a 5/10 Metroidvania?

I won't go into it all now, but I feel like the difficulty spike is a knock-on from the lack of collectibles. While you can argue about the usefulness of previous collectibles in Metroid games, in Dread they've been pared down to Missile Tanks, Energy Tanks, and Power Bomb Tanks. To make discovering those limited things more valuable, they pumped up boss difficulty so you'd either have to come in with a sufficiently high stockpile or perform a counter.

I'm not sure if that's 100% accurate and I may be generalizing my own experiences too much, but otherwise there's just not really enough excuse for me to go out of my way and collect all those Missile Tanks unless I'm specifically going for a completionist run. Seeing yet another +5 Missile Tank tucked away somewhere just doesn't make me go, "Wow, I need to get there!" but increasing the boss difficulty to a point that requires it also makes it feel less optional? Anyone agree?

certified Dread disdainer

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.

Try DCSS.

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.

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

What makes it so hard is, that most of the problems you're gonna face (starvation, sanaty, freezing, missing wappons/armor for battles) can be avoided/overcome easily only if you are prepared. Once the problems are here you often have no chance to deal with them when unprepared.

So after a while it becomes a constant danger evaluation in your head: There is an enemy... Fight or avoid? If i fight i might get hurt. Do i have time do find stuff to heal after the fight? And so on...

And adventure mode adds even more problems to the mix.

After writing this i realised that this sounds really stressful. But at the same time this is why i like this game so much :]

Iwbtg and all its successors and fan projects

Probably "Trap Adventure 2".
Imagine an old Mario game where Bowser has the most rediculous traps set up. You need to memorize all of the trap locations as well as have the coordination to tip-toe around them to survive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nW9k6k1I3k

old Mario game where Bowser has the most rediculous traps set up

Related classic: https://youtu.be/in6RZzdGki8

Dark souls, Bloodborne

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.

The hardest one I can say I'm honestly proud I figured out are the old "Impossible Mission" games from Epyx.

They have set rules, and once you figure out all the rules, they are solvable, but the platforming elements require precision and the puzzle elements are challenging.

8-bit Souls-Like?

Longplay - 1:

https://youtu.be/ivHFP3dJAkM

Longplay 2:

https://youtu.be/O2AEuLjwBrg

I used to play the first one on the Macintosh's on display at the store. Not sure I ever finished a level in the few minutes I always had to play when my parents were shopping. Very difficult, but fun!

I’m gonna say Jet Force Gemini. It’s not hard in that enemies or bosses are difficult, though some were. It was those damn Tribals. You had to save every single one of them if you wanted to beat the game, and some were a pain to save without them getting killed.

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.

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.

Last Battle on the Sega Megadrive (Genesis). I believe there's a handful of people who beat it, but it's genuinely impossible for mere mortals.

And then there's Spelunky 2

Resident evil revelations on inferno difficulty is just unfair.

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.

I've actually been waiting for anyone to mention any rhythm games at all. I think rhythm games in general tend to have low skill floor, but insanely high skill ceilings (Freedom Dive, some Hatsune Miku songs, ...), which make them an interesting case on the difficulty scale... Some rhythm games have unintuitive control too (OSU being a prime example with the mouse control, also Taiko series) which makes them even more difficult

Side note: I find it hilarious that the original game which OSU was based on was actually just a "tap a tablet" game though (Ouendan series, use stylus to click bottom screen of NDS)... also some JP arcades stock Reflec Beat and crossbeats Rev, Round1 has an exclusive game Tetote Connect, which are all "tap a button on the screen" games but you touch the screen with your hands instead

I agree, even the hardest non-rhythm games I seem to be able to get accustomed to in 50~100 hours, but not some of these monstrosities

The Donkey Kong tilt minigame in Nintendo Land is brutal.

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

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.

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.

EU4...

I like most other Paradox games and I'm at least decent in them I'd say but EU4 just eludes me.

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.

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.

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

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!

A lot of games made in the 90’s were difficult. But that’s before entitlement struck the gaming community and the “I need to beat this game in a weekend” turds were dictating how games turned out.

Games made in the early 90’s were made for cartridges and floppy disks with limited memory and couldn't contain a lot of content so difficulty was used to increase playtime.
- Nice theory, but no. Just look at WoW as a perfect example. When it launched in the early 00’s, overland content had a bit of a difficulty curve to it. It was clearly intended to be somewhat challenging overall.
  
  Other MMOs that followed had the same thing. ESO being a perfect example. In many places, and I recall it well- just doing side quests was risky. LoTRO is another good example.
  
  Then over the years, the player base whined and the developers caved in to appease what was and still is called: “the care bears.”
  
  The vocal majority of players that got tired of the grind and the difficulty, and whined their way into changing the overall feel of games to be winnable under the easiest of circumstances, and the last amount of time.
  
  ESO is a soloable joke of a game and WoW is a cartoon. Now, difficult games are a niche novelty.
- Here’s one now!