“We choose to play these games not because they are easy, but because they are hard.“This quote was allegedly said by American then-president John F. Kennedy in 1962, after losing sixteen hours of progress in a permadeath save.
You’re welcome to question the truth of this statement, but one thing is certain: sometimes, a game being hard makes it a game worth playing.
I put together this list based on personal experiences of pain, triumph, and as a testament to humanity’s stubbornness even in the face of impossible odds.
For each time a game here made me want to cry or prompted me to go play a brainless round of FIFA, there’s another time where it made me experience virtual victory in ways that only make me love the medium of videogames more.
10Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic
Rocks To Riches
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic
Building your own village, city, or even empire is not exactly a profound and unique gameplay format. What makes Workers & Resources unique is that it takes you away fromthe shackles of oppressive capitalism.
Armed with unwavering resolve to build a self-sustaining socialist republic, this is one of the most relaxing games I have ever played. Sure, it makes me want to cry once a small disruption cascades into the death of 80% of the population, but no game is perfect.
10 Insanely Difficult Achievements in Strategy Games
Try not to rip all your hair out chasing these achievements.
What makes Workers & Resources shine is the Realistic difficulty mode. Rather than artificially making the game harder,turning this setting on makes you painfully aware of the first law of thermodynamics.
For example, if you want to build anything, you need to source the workers, the materials, and the machinery required. You also need to handle any waste created by the process, unless you want your republic to look like a dump.
It’s possible to import some of the elements here, but even then, it means you have to send out your own vehicles to the border to bring the goods forward. It makes building your Soviet republic slow, but incredibly satisfying.
9Ghost of Tsushima
One Strike Is All It Takes
Ghost of Tsushima
The 2020 release ofGhost of Tsushimais the chief catalyst of the samurai revival that has swept the entertainment scene, and we cannot thank Sucker Punch enough for that.
Set during the first Mongol invasion of Japan, you get to play a tough-as-nails samurai in his quest to beat back the invaders on Tsushima Island.
Not everyone is familiar with thehistorical particularsof that period, but most people can deduce that being slashed with a sword will hurt really badly, or kill you outright. That’s what the Ghost of Tsushima Lethal difficulty is all about.
Rather than just buff enemies,Lethal mode makes almost everything in the game go down in three or fewer strikes, including you.It punishes mistakes but also heavily rewards you for proper technique.
I won’t pretend I didn’t occasionally get frustrated after fumbling a supposedly easy encounter three times (or thirty), but none of that mattered once I defeated the enemy at hand.
8Ghost Recon: Wildlands
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands
At a surface level,Ghost Recon: Wildlandsplays out like the bastard child ofGrand Theft Autoand Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario. You run around, shoot gangsters and corrupt cops, ‘borrow’ cars, then shoot people again.
While it is far from a difficult game by most standards, the Ghost Mode in Wildlands makes it extremely unforgiving. The concept is simple:if you die, the game deletes your save, and you have to start over. Did I mention this is a 30-40 hour game?
The threat of major heartbreak and unabashed gamer rage turns a relatively simplistic shoot-them-all game into a realisticstealth masterpiece.
Most of the game relies on infiltrating cartel and gendarmerie compounds, while outnumbered by anything from 4:1 to 20:1. In other words, do it quietly, or you’ll have a terrible time and have to start over. It’s masochism turned art.
7Sniper Elite: Resistance
Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast
Sniper Elite: Resistance
Running operationsbehind enemy linesin World War 2 normally meant playing the long game. The timeline between an agent being inserted and an operation taking place sometimes took months, sinceyou didn’t get do-overs in war.
Both Sniper Elite 5 andSniper Elite: Resistancesend you into occupied France in 1944, but I’m going with Resistance as it’s a more polished gameplay experience.
While the series is typically famous for its ballistic vasectomies and bombastic kill cams,playing it on the Authentic difficulty turns the game into a slow-burning experience where a simple mission can take an hour or three to complete.
You get no health regeneration, the ballistic computer cheat from emptying your lungs is turned off, enemies no longer have the object permanence of a newborn baby, and you die a lot faster.
As someone with chronic skill deficiency in Sniper Elite, playing it on Authentic brought me to the edge of my sanity, but completing missions felt so much more satisfying than the ‘screw it, I’ll shoot everyone’ approach I’d gotten used to.
6Alien: Isolation
It’s Behind Me, Isn’t It?
Alien: Isolation
Every day we don’t talk aboutAlien: Isolationis a day wasted. This game excels as a video game adaptation of a classic movie franchise and is one of the best things ever brought to thesurvival horrorgenre.
I especially love that Creative Assembly stuck to the ‘we’re powerless and about to die’ angle of the first movie rather than the ‘Space Rambo & Friends’ sequels.
Don’t get me wrong, Alien: Isolation is a fantastic game on any difficulty, but I could never play it in any setting other than Nightmare Mode after trying it. As the name softly hints, this is a bad time, but in a fun, moderately traumatizing way.
Nightmare Mode removes your map, your health bar, and makes the Xenomorph behave like a true predator. Your trusty motion tracker, previously infallible, now occasionally glitches out. Its noise alone can be enough to give out your position, which really makes you think before pulling it out.
Between that and managing your breath at all times, Alien: Isolation does a better impression of A Quiet Place thanthe franchise’s own game adaptation, which is saying something.
5The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
A New Immersive Fantasy
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
At this point, it’s safe to assume most people have playedThe Witcher 3, or are at least vaguely familiar with the characters and the overall premise. However, most adventurers have not completed the game on the Death March difficulty.
Despite the unnecessarily epic name, Death March is not some ridiculous difficulty boost created in a lab to cater for that one friend whose entire personality is built onDark Souls 3.
At its highest difficulty, The Witcher 3 finally plays like you are a witcher.All of the challenges and enemies the game throws at you are manageable, so long as you understand how to defeat them.
Signs, potions, and decoctions go from useful to absolutely imperative if you want to prevail. As the difficulty scales up later in the game, you need to actually dive into the bestiary so you can gear up accordingly.
It’s a much slower ride than other difficulties, but one that brings out the best aspects of The Witcher 3 and elevates it to the immersive RPG it really is.
4The Last of Us
Embrace Grounded Misery
The Last of Us
Naughty Dog has been on an unstoppable quest to sellThe Last of Usgamesmore times than Todd Howard can shovel Skyrimdown our throats.
I can’t blame the company for cashing in, especially when it brings outlegends like Pedro Pascalto act as poster boys for first-time fans. But, even still, it’s becoming meme-worthy at this point.
While The Last of Us is easily the most influential survival horror franchise of the last decade or so, its Grounded difficulty mode doesn’t get nearly enough attention. I’m listing the first game here, as it was the first to introduce this option; however, you can also choose it in subsequent sequels, remasters, and remakes.
10 RPGs With Insane Difficulty Spikes
We are going to discuss the games that don’t seem too hard on the surface, but house some of the craziest difficulty spikes out there.
The Grounded mode in The Last of Us throws you head-first into the experience.You have no HUD and no Listen Mode to help you locate enemies in combat. On the survival side of things, it also makes materials, weapons, and provisions much harder to come by.
If you feel your day is going too well, and you want to ruin it repeatedly, the Part I remake and all versions of Part II add the perma-death difficulty option. This means dying sends you back to the start of the game, but you’re able to also choose to have it reset only the current chapter or act progress.
3Metro: Exodus
If Not Us, Then Who?
Metro Exodus
Like the annoying kid who would bring the exact same toy to show and tell every week, I find myself talking aboutMetro Exodusagain. It’s not my fault 4A Games made it such a good game that ticks so many boxes.
Now, while Metro Exodus gets plenty of accolades for its gloomy atmosphere and sleek gameplay, not enough is said about the role difficulty settings play here.
The Ranger Hardcore difficulty turns the game from a mildly inconvenient adventure into the true post-apocalyptic survival horror it was meant to be. You have no HUD elements, resources are incredibly scarce, and you die just as easily as other human enemies.
Other than one poorly balanced sequence right at the beginning of the game as you make your way out of a Hansa base, it finally makes Metro Exodus feel fair — you’re able to dish out the pain, but so can the bad guys.
To ensure you fully immerse yourself in the experience, Ranger Hardcore also disables manual saves, so forget about saves sucuming. The game will save your progress during certain story points, and when you rest at a shelter, but that’s that.
2Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Medieval Peasant Simulator
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Ah, how I wish I had been just a regular guy in the Middle Ages… said exactly no one, ever. And yet,Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2brings you exactly that if you tire of heroics and play it in Hardcore mode instead.
Playing as Bohemia’s most popular wanderer in Hardcore mode helps level the playing field between you and those around you. Doing so meansHenry has no compass, no map marker, and no attack direction indicator.
In other words, you’ll need to know where you are, where the enemy is, and where you’re going, like a big Medieval boy. To help you commit to the bit, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 also disables fast travel and auto-saves.
At the very start of the game on hardcore difficulty, you are encouraged/forced to pick three negative perks that will stick with you to the end of your playthrough. It slows the game’s progression somewhat and makes you appreciate the world around you much more.
1The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Hey, I’m Walking Here
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Out of consideration of your time and sanity, I will not be making a “buySkyrim” joke here. But that’s mainly because I’ve already done so in this article. For all the clowning, it isn’t hard to see why Skyrim is still one of the most popular RPGs in the world over a decade after its initial release.
What makes Skyrim special (besides the mix of brilliant and utterly bizarre mods) is how immersive it can get, butafter you make it through the game in Survival Mode, you’ll start looking down on the plebs who are too scared to brave it.
Introduced in the 2017 Special Edition release, Survival Mode requires you to contend with hunger, exhaustion, and exposure to extreme temperatures. If you try to play tough, odds are you’ll contract an illness. Health no longer regenerates automatically, so you need to keep items at hand for that.
Inventory management has also been completely transformed, thanks to a combination of halved carry weight and the elimination of weightless items. This is especially relevant to archer types who carry more arrows than they can reasonably use in their lifetime.
What ties all of this together is the removal of fast travel. Being vulnerable to freezing water or exhaustion while not being able to carry an entire town on your back makes the journey as intense as the destination, and gets you to appreciate the attention to detail in the game.
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Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner! These are the 7 hardest battle royales that will push you to your limits as you try to secure the W.
