Top 10 Most Difficult Video Games Ever Made
Some games are hard. These games are something else entirely. They broke controllers, ended friendships, and in a few cases may have genuinely affected people’s mental health. Here are the ten most difficult video games ever made, ranked by how completely and mercilessly they punished the player.
#10 – Cuphead (2017)
Cuphead looks like a 1930s cartoon and plays like a punishment designed by someone who genuinely dislikes you. Every boss is a multi-phase nightmare of patterns, projectiles and split-second decisions. The hand-drawn animation is extraordinary and the game is technically fair — every death is learnable — but the sheer density of things trying to kill you at any given moment is staggering. Most players will spend more time on the loading screen than actually playing in their first few hours. That is not an exaggeration.
#9 – Ninja Gaiden (NES, 1988)
The NES Ninja Gaiden is one of the cruelest games ever designed. The controls are tight and the game is technically accomplishable, but the enemy placement is sadistic. Birds knock you off platforms into pits. Enemies respawn the moment you scroll slightly off screen. And if you die on the final boss — which you will, many times — the game sends you back several stages rather than the start of the fight. Players who completed it on the original hardware deserve genuine respect.
#8 – Contra (1987)
One hit and you are dead. No exceptions. Contra is a run-and-gun arcade classic that requires perfect execution and pixel-level accuracy. The infamous Turbo Tunnel stage remains one of the most discussed pieces of game design in history, a hover-bike section that required reactions so fast it felt physically impossible to first-time players. The 30-lives cheat code — Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A — is one of the most memorised sequences in gaming history, and it exists entirely because the base game is that brutal.
#7 – Battletoads (1991)
Battletoads is a game that seems designed to humiliate you. The Turbo Tunnel level — an obstacle course of pipes you must dodge on a speeder bike — comes early in the game and has a difficulty spike so extreme that most players never saw anything beyond it. The game got harder from there. Co-op mode was actually more difficult than solo because players could damage each other. Gaming magazines of the era used to receive calls from players convinced their cartridge was broken because they could not get past the early levels.
#6 – Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels (1986)
Released in Japan as Super Mario Bros 2 but deemed too difficult for Western audiences, The Lost Levels was eventually released internationally as part of Super Mario All-Stars. Nintendo’s decision to keep it out of Western markets was correct. The game features poison mushrooms designed to look like power-ups, wind that pushes you into pits, and warp zones that send you backwards rather than forwards. It plays like Super Mario Bros assembled by someone who wanted players to fail.
#5 – Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019)
FromSoftware are known for difficult games but Sekiro occupies a different category entirely. Unlike Dark Souls, which allows you to grind and build up your character to overcome obstacles, Sekiro demands pure skill. The posture system means you cannot simply tank hits — you must parry, deflect and counter with precise timing. The boss fights, particularly Genichiro Ashina and the Guardian Ape, are some of the most demanding encounters in modern gaming. The learning curve is vertical and the game offers no compromises whatsoever.
#4 – Spelunky 2 (2020)
Spelunky 2 is a procedurally generated platformer in which every run is different and death sends you back to the very beginning. The base game is extremely difficult. The deeper layers — Tide Pool, Sunken City, the cosmic horror that awaits beyond — are almost incomprehensibly hard. The game rewards mastery over hundreds of hours, not dozens. There are secrets so well hidden that the community took months to discover them. Completing the true final route, Cosmic Ocean, requires a level of execution that very few players in the world have achieved.
#3 – Demon’s Souls (2009)
Before Dark Souls, before Elden Ring, there was Demon’s Souls. FromSoftware’s original brutal action RPG established the template for everything that followed — deliberate combat, punishing death mechanics, and a world that told its story through environmental detail rather than exposition. The difficulty is not just mechanical. The game creates a genuine atmosphere of dread. When you die — and you will die constantly — you lose your accumulated souls and return to human form with half your maximum health. The first time the game takes everything from you, it feels personal.
#2 – Dark Souls (2011)
Dark Souls is the game that made difficulty fashionable again. At a time when mainstream games were becoming more accessible, FromSoftware released something that demanded everything from the player and offered almost no concessions. The Undead Asylum tutorial teaches you nothing. The bonfire system means progress is hard-won and easily lost. Bosses like Ornstein and Smough became cultural touchstones. The phrase “git gud” entered gaming vocabulary because of this game. Completing it for the first time remains one of the most satisfying experiences in gaming. If you want to experience everything FromSoftware created, Dark Souls: The Complete Collection is where to start.
#1 – Takeshi’s Challenge (1986)
Dark Souls is famous. Battletoads is notorious. But Takeshi’s Challenge is the hardest game ever made because it was designed to be impossible by someone who openly stated he despised video games. Created by Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano, the game contains tasks that are genuinely undoable without a strategy guide — one section requires you to leave your character standing still for an hour in real time. Another requires you to sing into the microphone. There are no instructions, no hints, and no logic. It is less a game than a hostile art project. No one was ever meant to finish it.
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