Forgot what made me think about this topic but I’ve been considering this for a week or two… Curious what you all think.
When I mean “hardest” “video game”, I mean whatever game that you find objectively more difficult than all other ones on the market, as long as it’s a video game. I guess exposure to different genres/types of games can influence the answer to this question a lot so… Hence I was curious about your rationale.
I have a pretty solid answer & rationale but I guess I shouldn’t share that in the main post to bias results…
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…
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.
Then there’s games like the original “pirates!”. It has an anti cheat that would present itself as a simple question like “do you recognize whose pirate flag that is”. The answer is in the booklet, and if you answer wrong nothing visible happens but the difficulty is cranked so high that the game becomes effectively unbeatable.
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…
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
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”?
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.