AS 2023 gears up to be the biggest post-2020 year in video games, with a great start in the recently released Dead Space remake, here are some of the games considered by many to be the hardest contemporary games across PC and consoles.
Darkest Dungeon
Darkest Dungeon is a grim side-scrolling dungeon crawler that assigns players with a pre-assembled team of adventurers.
Each of the dungeon is procedurally-generated and filled with a number of traps and unique items to discover, as well as being rife with enemies.
Progressing through the dungeons causes the torch that players are equipped with to burn out. The dimmer it gets, the weaker the group becomes, and the weaker they become, the less of a good time this adventure will become as gameplay will shift towards being advantageous for the myriad of enemies and beasts lurking the darker confines of the dungeons.
Darkest Dungeon balances the risk-to-reward perfectly; the deeper players go, the higher the risk of everyone in the party dying becomes, but the reward is valuable treasure.
Fear & Hunger
Similar to Darkest Dungeon, but much, much harder with a far more intricate story and design.
The game drops the player into a fantasy world with only one goal depending on the chosen starting character. There is zero handholding and gameplay tips. Progress is achieved through trial and error.
The game is a soul crushing hard role-playing game filled with interesting characters, messed up enemies, macabre nudity, rich mythology of ancient deities, and a plethora of options to navigate the world and choices that lead to several endings.
In Fear & Hunger, everything can and will kill the player, especially with its random coin flip mechanic that decides outcomes to different scenarios. In combat, enemies can destroy limbs of characters, effectively reducing fighting effectiveness and even navigation i.e. if the player character’s legs are chopped off, they effectively have to crawl around slowly, or start a new game and try again. The sequel, Fear & Hunger: Termina was recently released.
Cuphead
Don’t be fooled by the 1930s-era visuals of cartoons from the mid-20th century, or by the beauty of animation and creativity, or even the delightful soundtrack; Cuphead is an excruciatingly difficult game.
Mixing run-and-gun gameplay with bullet hell and quick platforming sequences, Cuphead is essentially a boss rush game; you rush from one boss to the next, hoping to clear each without dying. Cuphead demands concentration and precision.
Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring
Part of the Souls umbrella, these games by FromSoftware have come to mould and define what makes a videogame hard in the 21st century, and each serve as blueprint for other games by other studios attempting to emulate what FromSoftware has done.
These games, as beautifully rich in atmosphere, design and world-building as they are, are completely masochistic and sadistic.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Like the previous games under the Souls umbrella, Sekiro was also developed by FromSoftware.
The reason it’s not grouped with the rest is due to how the game is so hard that it exists on a completely different realm to its cousins. Despite sharing similarities to the aforementioned, Sekiro is a single-player game.
In a Souls game, players are able to summon allies – either controlled by AI or other real-world players – to help them get through difficult areas and bosses. That doesn’t exist in Sekiro.
Whether you like it or not, or whether you’ve died over 30 times, you will have to persevere in taking down that gigantic monkey boss with its different phases.
Sekiro has players controlling Wolf, a shinobi that uses both samurai and ninja tactics in medieval fantasy Japan. Mastery over the game’s sword and parrying mechanics and utilisation of various ninja tools is just as quintessential as absolute patience and unyielding willpower in not giving up.
The game is unforgiving, especially in taking down the final, most absurd boss in gaming history, but players who beat the game will never have their “gaming prowess” questioned.
