Hard games come in all shapes and sizes with the same intent across the board: to provide you a balanced challenge. Games like Dark Souls relentlessly test your skill and endurance, while others like XCOM stack the quantitative odds against you from the start. Older titles on this list may have been influenced by their arcade counterparts in that the difficulty stemmed primarily from scamming more quarters from little kids.
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Video games have since come a long way in providing various difficulty options for you before you start a game. In some instances, games can even sense when you are losing and offer you a tip or advantage. Some of the following games may make you experience cold sweats, phantom thumb pain, and visions of dread. Make sure you save your game because below is a ranked list of the hardest games ever released.
Recipient of multiple awards, including the BAFTA Games Award for Strategy, Firaxis Games' XCOX: Enemy Unknown was released in 2012. XCOM is a turn-based tactical strategy game where you command a squad of soldiers into battle to secure resources, save civilians, and recover alien technology to upgrade your XCOM facilities post-mission.
Your soldiers can level up, learn new abilities, and operate new alien weapons and technology. You can name your soldiers, choose their outfits, and customize your entire squad to look and feel unique. The catch is, if your soldiers die in battle, they are permanently dead and cannot be chosen for subsequent missions. If you spent hours honing and crafting your perfect alien death squad and things go bad during a mission, rest easy soldier.
9/10 Cuphead
Studio MDHR's run-and-gun instant classic, Cuphead, is the type of game that really frowns upon blinking. The gorgeous animations and crisp visuals are almost a necessity here as the screen can get really busy if you aren't on top of your game. Jump, air dash, and parry hours of boss battles and fun platforming stages, but beware; this game is a tough one.
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Playing with a friend may help whittle-down a boss' health bar faster but this game suffers from the same difficulty trope that plague games like Contra--more players mean more chaos on screen. Cuphead demands you recognize patterns and know when to zig and, most importantly, where to zag.
8/10 Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde
The Nintendo Entertainment System is a legendary system that was home to some of the most important video games in the history of the industry. It is ever so fitting that some of the hardest games ever released were on the little-grey-box-that-could.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the NES is a game that you hide when your friends come over because you haven't quite figured out how to play and probably never will. You play as Jekyll and Hyde on your mission to get to your wedding in time. On your single-day mission, you encounter the most brutal enemies in video game history: bees, singing women, a child, pooping birds, and a man with a stick and a hat. Along the way, you also realize you probably should've rented Zelda or Mario.
7/10 Ghost 'n Goblins
The punishment you receive in Capcom's 1985 Ghosts 'n Goblins is unlike anything seen in most mainstream games today. You play Sir Arthur on your mission to save the princess, and along the way you are grossly outmatched even by a lowly first-level bat. You get hit twice and you die, at which point you restart the level. You can grab an extra hit-point in the way of armor, but this power up is few and far between. When you lose your 3 lives, you start the game over from the beginning.
Even hard video games today provide you with some form of save function or WARNING notice before going into a hostile area you may not be ready for. Not here, Sir Arthur; it's back to the start menu for you.
6/10 Contra
Contra for the NES is a difficult game. Period. However, what brings this 1987 NES classic to number six on this list is the game gets exponentially more difficult with a second player.
Two player NES Contra significantly changes the gameplay in that you and your partner can drastically control the forward progression. There are platforming sections riddled throughout the missions, and if you jump and advance the screen before your partner is ready, its okay that you got angry. It's not your fault.
5/10 Celeste
Mount Celeste is calling your name, Madeline, and you better get those platforming shoes out because this game is scream-in-the-pillow difficult. Celeste, developed by Matt Makes Games, gives you all the tools you need to slide, jump, platform, air-dash, wave and super dash your way up the treacherous mountain.
Celeste is a hard game, but it makes it to number five on the list because of its silky smooth movement, precise platform gameplay, its compelling story, and the endorphin-rich feeling you get when you conquer a stage.
4/10 Super Meat Boy
Speaking of endorphins: Anger, meet Meat Boy. Meat Boy, meet Anger. Team Meat's 2010 platformer Super Meat Boy is one of the hardest games ever made but for all the right reasons. Hard games do not have to be bad; they just need be fair.
When you die in Super Meat Boy, it's probably your own fault. The precise gameplay mechanics offer everything you need to execute pixel perfect platforming prowess. You will die often, but that's okay because the game instantly puts you right where you need to be to try again, and again, and again, and again. And, as a bonus, the game shows you every attempt you made that run after you beat the level. The cacophony of splattering meat is blissfully soothing--or ridiculously embarrassing.
3/10 Dark Souls
Sometimes a hard game can be so rewarding, the challenge is worth every corpse run. Dark Souls punishes you for making bad decisions and rewards you with enduring and overcoming those bad decisions. FromSoft's 2011 Dark Souls arguably ushered in a new era of hard video games.
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FromSoft designed Dark Souls mechanics so tightly and precise, it's hard to argue that when things go wrong you weren't at fault. Granted, there are instances where Dark Souls is brutally difficult to the point where you may need to grind just to level the playing field, power-wise, but the grind is what hones your skills. The more you play, the more efficient you become. But also, sometimes you need to take all your gear off and high-tail it to the next bonfire, grind be damned.
In Dark Souls, each life is precious, so use the second one more carefully than you did the first.
2/10 The Witness
Jonathan Blow's 2016 The Witness is a gorgeous open world-esque puzzle game that is unlike anything that's come before. While painfully difficult in some of the later areas, The Witness is a marvel of a challenging puzzle game design that is widely rewarding even dozens of hours in.
The environment cues, music, ambience, and mysteriousness of the island in The Witness compels you to solve each puzzle, no matter how swollen your brain may become. The extreme elation when conquering an especially troublesome puzzle and unlocking the secrets to the narrative and the world makes this game a solid number 2 on this list.
1/10 Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
Some games are hard but leave you with a great feeling at the end, like Celeste. Other games punish you until you agree to their terms and conditions, like Dark Souls.Castlevania II: Simon's Quest for the NES is an open-world redacted government document where the blacked-out text is in another book.
NPCs straight up give you obscure or irrelevant information. There appear to be various localization errors when the game shipped to the US, effectively making it impossible to actually beat this game without the use of a guide. The game also features a Day and Night cycle that increases enemy power at night. On top of all that, platforming is a touch unresponsive, which can make the platforming sessions an absolute nightmare.
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