Quick Links
There are many games that are well-known for being very difficult.Dark Souls, Sekiro, Cuphead, Battletoads… these games can be tough, but they’re generally manageable with practice. Today, I want to talk about the real biggest challenges in gaming—the cruelest, most sadistic experiences possible.
1TheHaloLASO Challenge
The hardest difficulty in each of theHalogames is called Legendary. The enemies are more durable, the player takes more damage, and you might find fewer powerful weapons and ammo throughout the levels. But for vets of the series, Legendary is really nothing special, hardly a challenge at all. Fans who want a real grueling challenge force themselves to go through the most painful experience possible: a LASO run.
LASO stands for “Legendary, All Skulls On.” InHalo,skulls are modifiers for the game, 90% of which make it much tougher for you. The Famine skull cuts all ammo drops in half. Black Eye makes it so that your shields only recharge when you melee an enemy. Blind disables every single element on your HUD, and even makes your gun invisible. Others increase enemy health and damage resistance, upgrade them all to their deadliest variants, make them throw way more grenades at you, and more.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the Iron skull: if you’re playing solo, this skull will force you to restart theentire levelwhen you die. In co-op, it forces you to restart at the last checkpoint ifeither playerdies. Needless to say, a LASO run of anyHalogame is incredibly difficult, and some of theHalogames have unique skulls that make things even worse.Combat Evolvedhas a skull that prevents you from picking up any Covenant weapons.Halo2 has one that makes every single enemy cloaked.
Beating just one entry doing a LASO run is a huge challenge. ButThe Master Chief Collectiontakes it one step further, with a special achievement for beating every title in the collection on LASO, called LASO Master. The number of players who have gotten this achievement? Less than 0.03% on Xbox. That doesn’t surprise me at all: even as a vet with two decades of LegendaryHaloexperience, even I don’t have the mettle to do something that insane.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
WHERE TO PLAY
Initially hampered by terrible bugs and network support, The Master Chief Collection is now one of the best shooter anthologies available.
One of the things that makes thegaming challengesI’m discussing today so difficult is the inability to memorize the right actions to take. You see, in something likeDark SoulsorElden Ring,you can memorize the attack patterns of even the most difficult boss, and with enough repetition, you can perfect your response to everything they do. In games likeWolfenstein: The New Orderand its sequel,The New Colossus,this doesn’t work.
You can’t predict what each and every enemy AI in an FPS is going to do on every run. Sometimes they might charge you recklessly. Maybe next time they will throw a grenade. Maybe the third time, they’ll flank and shoot you in the back. This is true for almost every FPS, but inWolfenstein’sMein Leben difficulty, the toughest of them all, it’s more than a grueling challenge. It’s maddening. Infuriating. Demoralizing. Only a masochist would ever do it.
First of all, enemies do absurd amounts of damage to you on this difficulty. Even the lowliest grunt can easily dispatch you with a quick burst of bullets, so if you’reevercaught lacking by almost any enemy, you’re probably toast. Secondly, your enemies are much more accurate than in the easier game modes. Every single foe you fight is an elite marksman. Thirdly, they are all more durable and harder to defeat.
And to top it all off, you only get one life. For the entire game. Not per level, for theentiregame, from the first level to the last. If you die, you have to start the entire grueling experience all over again. And yes, you will have to sit through the unskippable cutscenes at the beginning of the game every single time. Coincidentally, just like LASO Master forHalo,the number of Xbox players who have this achievement is just 0.03%.
I can’t imagine it’s much better on any other platform.
2XCOM 2’s Ironman Mode
FPS games aren’t the only genre host to some incredibly difficult challenges.XCOM 2is aturn-based tactical strategy gamethat requires you to both manage resources and race against time to stop an alien threat, but also command your soldiers on an individual level in combat encounters that emulate real warfare in one particular way: if something can go wrong, it will.
A soldier will miss a near guaranteed shot. A vehicle will protect someone from a grenade, then explode and take them out instead. A random civilian hanging out on a rooftop for some reason will see your squad trying to sneak around and alert the entire map to their presence. Getting royally screwed by this game is such a common occurrence that the phrase “that’s XCOM baby!” is in the back pocket of every player as a means of cope.
Save-scumming can mitigate these ill twists of fate… unless you’re playing Ironman mode, in which there is no manual save, and the game autosaves after every single decision you make. Everything you do is final. If a poor decision costs you a mission, that’s it. If an enemy who has just 2% chance to hit your best soldier blows him away, you have to accept it. In a game that’s well-known for almost every mission going wrong somehow, Ironman makes the experience even more harrowing.
you may play on lower difficulties with Ironman mode on, of course, but where’s the fun in that?
Years ago,Nier: Automatatook the world by storm. This weird combination of bullet hell and hack-n-slash hit us all with a riveting, complex story that was more a treatise on the struggles of life than anything else. Well, as long as you played through to the main endings, instead of eating a fish and dying unceremoniously. The game had plenty of joke endings too.
But overall, it wasn’t a very hard game on any of its regular difficulties. It was fairly easy to get so overpowered that you could steamroll almost any problem, boss fight or otherwise. However, on Very Hard difficulty, things ramp up quite a bit: aside from enemies being way more durable and using more complex, difficult-to-evade attacks, you also can’t use the game’s lock-on feature, and you die in one hit from any attack.
Having to avoid any hit in a game that often involves hundreds of projectiles coming your way in small battle areas is darn tough. This difficulty forces you to get really good at evasion and timing. It’s not as tough as the games that only give you one life or force level restarts, but getting through all the dozens of endings on this difficulty would certainly be a challenge for all but the most skilled gamers.
3Veteran Difficulty onCall of Duty: World at War
Here’s a challenge that I actually have accomplished myself, though the stress took ten years off my life and brought gray hairs into my scalp before I hit 30.Call of Dutyhas always included a Veteran difficulty mode that’s pretty difficult. At one point, I made it a mission to get through most of them on that difficulty. TheModern Warfaretrilogy had a few tough spots, but was pretty manageable.Infinite Warfarewas mostly a cakewalk. Even the first three original entries weren’t too harrowing.
World at Warwas a literal nightmare. To be fair, the difficulty description outright states that “you will not survive.” But man, it’s just downright unfair. This is one of those games anddifficulties where the AI literally cheatsagainst you. Every enemy soldier has an aimbot. Some guy with a pistol will dome you from way outside of a sidearm’s realistic effective range. If you take coveranywherefor more than three seconds, multiple grenades will land at your feet with perfect accuracy.
Needless to say, the gameplay loop usually involves picking off one or two enemies, immediately taking cover because you took a hit, three grenades landing at your feet, and you sprinting into the open to get away, only to get hit a second time and die. Luck is the prominent factor in whether or not you can make it to the next piece of cover to play the song and dance all over again. You will grow intimately familiar with various checkpoints.
The good news is that the game is at least a little more predictable than something likeWolfenstein,so you may gradually work out a playbook of which enemy to attack first, where to take cover, the best way to reach the objective, and so on. It works for a number of stages, but it’s all fun and games until you reach the “Heart of the Reich” level.World at Waris a pretty oldCODtitle, but in my opinion it’s still one of the best—even if its veteran difficulty tortured me for fun.
4ModernDOOMon Ultra Nightmare DIfficulty
TheDOOMgames from 2016 onward are published by the same guys that did all of the newerWolfensteingames, and it’s easy to see the resemblance between them, as they are bothfrenetic, chaotic FPS gameswith high-speed, high-impact gameplay against hordes of unrelenting enemies. On easier difficulties, the player gets to feel like an invincible war machine capable of destroying everything that stands in their path with ease.
But these games also share a grueling challenge: their hardest difficulty involves clearing the entire game with just one life on top of all of the other difficulty settings, such as enemies doing more damage, being more numerous, or attacking more aggressively. ForDOOM,this is the Ultra Nightmare difficulty, and it’s one of the most demanding challenges in modern gaming.
You will need absolute focus in every single fight. You will have to carefully manage all of your resources to avoid getting yourself into a hopeless spiral where you just don’t have enough ammo or survivability to win. You’ll need to min-max your build. There is absolutely no room for mistakes, as even the slightest misjudgment can send you back to the very beginning of the game. Like Mein Leben difficulty in modernWolfenstein,only the most incredible gamers can accomplish this challenge.
Admittedly, most of the games we’ve covered here today are first-person shooters, though there’s a good reason the genre contains so many horrific challenges. That said, almostany game can provide a difficult challengeif you want to undertake a challenge run. Granted, these challenges are self-imposed and require discipline from the gamer, but they also allow flexibility in how a challenge can be fun and balanced.
Still, if you really want the right to brag about your gaming skills, adding one of the insane challenges we talked about to your resume just can’t be beaten.
