Some games revel in their difficulty and proudly display it as a selling point. Many games even have extremely customizable settings, to the point where you can make the game impossible.
But some games have well-designed difficulty settings that are supposed to both push your limits to the extreme and be crafted in a way to make sure they can still be beaten, at least by a brave few.
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They offer the kind of punishment where you at least know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel if you keep trudging on, but at the same time, no one would blame you for giving up.
10Full Dive Ranger Hardcore
Metro Exodus
Hardcore was originally the highest difficulty for theMetroseries, decreasing available resources and increasing damage received.
DLC forMetro 2033andMetro: Last Nightadded Ranger modes, with Ranger Hardcore being the Hardcore setting, but both you and your enemies receive increased damage, and your HUD is removed.
Metro Exodustakes things up a notch with Ranger Hardcore Full Dive mode. At first, it seems like it does the same thing as Ranger Hardcore in previous Metro games, removing the HUD entirely.
However, because of a few differences in the way Exodus is designed, such as the game’s partially Open World nature, the lack of a HUD is a much bigger problem.
Sid Meier’s Civilization VI
Sid Meier’s Civilization 6
Strategy games don’t always feel fair, but Deity inCivilization VIis unfair by design. Your enemies spawn with more resources, generate resources faster, and have a strong combat advantage.
The only way to beat them is by completely outsmarting them. Making a few better choices than your opponents won’t be enough. You will have to consistently play well just to catch up.
One of the arduous parts of this mode is that, until you start to catch up with the strongest civilizations, an angry opponent can easily take you out of the game. Having to start over halfway through a game because an AI opponent randomly decided they hate you is a painful experience.
8Co-op Legendary
Legendary difficulty is the highest difficulty setting inHalo,and it’s particularly brutal inHalo 2thanks to missions like Gravemind.
Checkpoints are rare, enemies are better equipped, the AI is much more aggressive and quick to react, and your shields barely protect you. A hidden Jackal Sniper can erase several minutes of progression with one shot.
To make things harder, if either person dies when playing co-op, you’re both set back to the last checkpoint.
Two people mean twice the potential for mistakes. You both better be prepared for what you’re getting into because this torturous mode could ruin a friendship.
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.
Guitar Hero III: Legends Of Rock
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
Expert, the hardest mode in the series, is a challenge in anyGuitar Hero. In this mode, you’re often required to play even more notes than are actually being played in the song.
However, what makes Expert the most punishing inGuitar Hero 3isthe song selection. Infamously difficult songs like Through The Fire And Flames and Raining Blood will throw an absurd amount of notes your way, with up to 26 notes per second.
Getting off track can make it a nightmare to recover from because of the barrage of notes coming your way, and you could get booed off stage at a moment’s notice.
6Legend + Ironman
InXCOM 2, Legend is the highest difficulty level, making enemies tougher, more enemies spawn, making research take much longer, among other things. It turns up the difficulty in every way.
However, where it gets really hard is by turning on the additional Ironman mode. Ironman mode removes manual saves and constantly autosaves, meaning you can’t reload a save file to fix your mistakes.
InXCOM 2, your characters have permadeath, and you have to painstakingly keep them alive to keep them on the level of your enemies.
This means that one mistake at any point in your playthrough can snowball into an irrecoverable mess.
5Survivor Mode
Survivor mode in this apocalyptic city-building game turns up all difficulty sliders to the max, including the economy, people’s needs and attitudes toward you, and negative weather effects. However, to make things more difficult, it also turns off manual saves and pauses.
Frostpunkcan be a challenging game even on easier settings, as there are so many things that can go wrong.
You have to balance several kinds of resources and the citizens' needs and demands. Prioritizing any of them means sacrificing something else, but sometimes you’re required to.
Given how there are no manual saves in Survivor mode, there’s little room for mistakes throughout the entire playthrough. Mismanaging one resource for a few in-game hours could leave the whole town freezing with no hope of recovering. And throughout all that, you can’t pause to give yourself time to think.
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4Naked Brutality + Losing Is Fun + Commitment Mode
RimWorldgives you plenty of settings to make the game nightmarishly difficult. There’s the starting scenario, the AI storyteller difficulty, and the save style.
The Naked Brutality scenario starts you off with a single naked character and no supplies, the Losing Is Fun difficulty turns up how often bad events will be thrown your way to the max, and Commitment mode removes manual saves.
Any one of these modes on their own is punishing, but you may turn all three of them on at the same time. If you do, you’ll have nothing, the world will actively try to kill you, and you can’t reload when things go bad. Good luck!
3NG+7 + Demon Bell
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Soulsborne games are infamously punishing, withSekirobeing no exception. You’re expected to die over and over, ideally learning from your mistakes.
Not only are these games hard on your first playthrough, but once you beat the game, you can often replay them on a strenuous mode called NG+, or New Game Plus. InSekiro, you can do this up to NG+7, or 7 levels of difficulty higher than the standard game.
Not only that, but you can alsoactivate another hard mode at any time with the Demon Bell. Ringing the bell increases damage and damage resistance of enemies, much like turning up the difficulty settings another notch.
2Hard + The Lost
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Hard mode inThe Binding of Isaacis pretty straightforward. You get tougher enemies and more of them, fewer rewards, and more rooms per floor to make things more confusing.
But where things get really hard is when playing as The Lost. While you could argue that The Lost is a character and not a difficulty setting, the whole point of the character is to make things difficult. The Lost dies with a single hit.
You can unlock the Holy Mantle as a starting item for The Lost, which blocks damage once per room. However, even beating Mom’s Heart to get the easiest unlockable item for The Lost is an extreme challenge, and that’s with the Holy Mantle.
1Ultra-Nightmare
DOOM Eternal
DOOM Eternalis fast-paced and chaotic. Even on the easiest setting, the game is designed to be tougher than your average FPS game, and you can make it even more chaotic by turning the difficulty up to Nightmare mode.
Nightmare mode makes the enemies deal more damage than the standard Hurt Me Plenty mode and makes AI considerably more aggressive than even the harder Ultra-Violence mode.
Nightmare can be cruel as it is, but now imagine doing that without dying at all for an over 14-hour long campaign. That’s what you have to do in Ultra-Nightmare mode. You have only one life for the entire playthrough. Ultra-Nightmare is certainly an appropriate name for it.
