The 25 Hardest Games Of The Millennium

Sure, most games are considered hard because they test your reflexes or just want to steal you quarters. No one ever talks about the games that are hard to play because they suck, though—and Dark Void is the king of those games. There's plenty to complain about here, but the absolute worst is the fact that, for a game that's supposed to be about flying around with a rocket pack, there is painfully little flying. The difficulty in Dark Void has little to do with the awful controls or poor game design, and has everything to do with stopping yourself from breaking your own fingers so you don’t have to play anymore.

One of the best ways to make a hard game in this new era of easy games is to take an old one (Bionic Commando) and sex it up with new graphics. Sure, the controls are a little more responsive and there are some tweaks the make the game easier to swallow, but it's still an exercise in sadistic nostalgia that left us screaming at my TV at the exact same places as we did 20 years ago. Which we guess makes it masochistic nostalgia.

Just because the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are supposed to be extinct doesn’t mean they are less inclined to eat you. The same is largely true of the most recent Mega Man games. They look like the old games, they feel like the old game, and they punish you like the old games—but they are, in fact, new games. The craziness of MM9 was addressed in Mega Man 10 with an easy mode that gave you different enemies, fewer spike traps, and more power-ups. Guess what? Still hard.

Pound for pound, the platformer is probably the easiest genre to make incredibly hard. For proof, look no further than Super Meat Boy, the beloved downloadable title in which you take the role of a main character made of meat trying to navigate what amounts to an elaborate meat grinder. "Ground and pound" never had such resonance.

Super Meat Boy takes its inspiration from I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game, a vicious free-to-download PC game. You take The Guy on a magical side-scrolling journey through a mash-up 8-bit world where everything is deadly. Worse, the entire world works in the direct opposite of the ways we have come to expect video game worlds to work, meaning reliance on instinct itself will get you killed. Thanks.

The Aggravating Final Boss Fight phenomenon hit an all new low with Street Fighter IV’s Seth. Nothing says "thrilling conclusion oh wait not really" like getting your ass kicked repeatedly by a naked bald guy. And again, for a game built around stringing together combos, it's incredibly sad to have to resort to the cheapest tactics (the leg sweep, repeated ad infinitum, is our personal choice) to take out the final boss.

Like its predecessor, though slightly less so, Dead Space 2 makes the very act of picking up the controller and playing an exercise of willpower. There's solace to be found in its action setpieces, but overall, this terrifying game makes other survival horror games look like a walk in the park. That said, it doesn’t hold a candle to the original....

In terms of sheer horror, nothing comes close to the relentless pace set by Dead Space. Every second of the game, you feel like you are in mortal danger...because you are. During the moments that other games would allow you to relax and regroup—trips on the elevator, walking down a nondescript hallway, interacting with NPCs for plot points—Dead Space is still actively trying to kill you. Best played during the day, in 30-minute intervals, with your psychologist’s number on the speed dial.

The entire MediEvil franchise lures you into thinking that it's a creepy/cute adventure in the vein of The Nightmare Before Christmas...and nothing could be further from the truth. Resurrection (technically a remake of the original 1998 game) is no exception; the platforming and combat may seem like goofy fun, but just wait until you spy that collectible chalice perched high in some seemingly unreachable place. Then see how many lives—and hours—you waste trying to get to it.

Some things get lost in translation. Like the Japanese word for ‘Hard,’ which apparently translates to ‘Normal’ in English. This style-over-substance actioner, arguably the best in the series, has no sympathy for the casual player. Even veterans will be forced to watch Dante be done in by demons and grim reapers fairly regularly. Which is actually fine by us—it’s kinda satisfying to see that pretty boy get knocked around every now and then. Or, given the game, every now and now and now.

Hey, you know what's fun? Being shot at while you're driving down the road to a hostile base where you'ill be shot at some more. There, when you take too many bullets, your buddy will show up and save your bacon, which is awesome—at least until he takes a round in the chest and you can’t do anything to help him except put a bullet in his head. Then, after you blow up the enemy base, you drive back to town and get shot at even more. Wait, you know what? That doesn’t sound like fun at all.

It's the rare game that introduces actual physical suffering to increase the challenge (well, aside from those photosensitive seizures the PlayStation is constantly warning us about). Mirror’s Edge is a first-person parkour action platformer—and if you think you aren’t going to be overcome with motion sickness while you're dashing across rooftops, then you've got a fighter-pilot jumpsuit in your closet we didn't know about. Don’t say we didn’t warn you when you tumble off a crane 25 stories to your grisly death.

Speaking of grisly deaths, for a game seemingly devoted to cooperative play, NSMBW is disturbingly devoted to making you watch your friends die, over and over again. The game is challenging enough solo, but add another player and the game, with its bumpy physics, becomes a Herculean challenge. Play with four players, as Shigeru Miyamoto inexplicably seems to want you to do, and you're doomed to do nothing except get angry at everyone else playing. Families have disintegrated over this one, we're sure of it.

Probably the best racing game of its generation, F-Zero GX is also one of the most difficult. The story mode has difficulty spikes that require inhuman reflexes and prescience to complete. Like many games on this list, this one's narrow tracks, frenetic pace, and sharp turns seem designed to frustrate rather than entertain.

Maximo starts off well enough as an action platformer inspired by the classic (and horrifically hard) Ghosts 'n Goblins. In fact, through most of the game, it's juuuust challenging enough to give you that sense of accomplishment when you make it through a level. At least until you reach Hell. It is there, among the lava flows, ax throwers and floating platforms, that the game begins to get in touch with its heritage. It probably got worse, but we never got any further.

Remember when the RPG maestros at Bioware made third person shooters? Don’t feel bad, most people don’t. MDK2 follows the adventures of a janitor in a high-tech battle suit fending off an alien invasion with the help of a mad scientist and a six-legged, gun-toting robot dog. It's never officially revealed in the game what "MDK" stands for, but fans theorized it stood for "Murder Death Kill"—all of which will happen to you plenty of times over the course of the game.

There are a lot of reasons why Alien Hominid is one of the most difficult games in the last 11 years, so here are but a few. One: the fact that it goes by the old one-hit kill formula of side-scrolling shooters. Two: things that can hit you tend to cluster on the screen by the hundreds at any given time. Three: the game is so damn pretty, it's easy to get distracted from all the death hurtling at you. Super Meat Boy got a lot of love from critics when it came out, but it barely packs half the suffering Alien Hominid did.

The shmup is a genre that's notoriously frenetic and difficult to master, but Ikaruga wasn't content simply to throw endless waves of enemies and bullets at players. No, Ikaruga upped the frantic ante by introducing black-and-white polarity. Switch to black and only the white bullets can kill you; switch to white and the opposite is true. Meanwhile, the same is true of your bullets' relationship with their targets. They don’t call it "bullet hell" for nothing.

Ninja Gaiden gets a lot of the previous-gen ninja attention with its precision combat and platforming and whatnot, but what about long levels with no checkpoints? What about bottomless pits? What about a sword that starts draining your health bar if you aren’t fighting? If you didn’t hate ninjas before playing Shinobi, you most definitely will after.

If you ever played the original Contra without using the famous Konami code, you have a pretty good idea of what awaits you in Shattered Soldier: death, death, and more death. Worse, there are multiple endings, the best of which depend on higher hit ratios and fewer lives lost (ha!). Even funnier: it has a plot!

At the time of its release, Ninja Gaiden boasted one of the deepest combat systems in video games. Where many of the games on this list are accidentally difficult, Ninja Gaiden was consciously designed to be challenging and remains so a console generation and seven years later. Its devotion to skill and precision is a rare thing indeed. Not that we'd know, seeing as how we set our copy on fire 15 minutes after we opened it.

Like Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta has a shockingly deep combat system. New combo strings seem to appear by magic, whipping out as easily as the titular character’s monster-hair bodysuit. Yes, you read that right. Where Ninja Gaiden was hard because it tested a player’s reflex, Bayonetta is hard because it constantly distracts players with an endless parade of increasingly bizarre situations. Blown kisses are bombs, hair is a weapon, angels have screaming baby faces, and the best place for guns is embedded in high-heel shoes. If you can concentrate on combos while taking all that in, more power to you.

The original Donkey Kong Country was an incredibly difficult side-scrolling platformer, and the latest installment of the series takes great joy in continuing that tradition. Death and danger are omnipresent and making it through a level unscathed is an accomplishment. Brutal is the first word that comes to mind—so much so that, should you die more than 8 times in a level, the game will offer to take over for you. If that doesn’t add insult to injury, then we know what you can do with one of those bananas.

Demon’s Souls is, without a doubt, the most challenging game in recent memory. There's the fact that a player can enter another player’s game to hunt them down and kill them when said first player is busy exploring. There's also the fact that when a player dies against a boss and returns to face it again, the boss is more powerful and the player has a shortened life bar. And then there's the matter of not being able to pause the game. Regardless of the reasons, Demon’s Souls is the also most insidious game because no matter the difficulty, its beauty and mystery entices players to go ever deeper.