Be it a game that’s difficult in its entirety, or a particular challenge in a game that you just couldn’t complete.

For me, there are three that come to mind:

  • Super Hostile: Waking Up (Minecraft Custom Map, Hard difficulty). That damn water section…
  • Terraria Zenith Mode. Coming from someone to whom Master Mode is fairly easy, this was rough.
  • Calamity Death Mode (Terraria). I beat DoG (this was back when a headshot was an automatic death), but I just could not click with the Yharim fight. I also think burnout was at play here because that was a LONG playthrough.
  •  Maestro   ( @Maestro@kbin.social ) 
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    10 months ago

    Hollow Knight. I love that game but I am in my mid 40s and my reaction time isn’t what it used to be. And it’s not even the bosses. I just can’t make it past the spike section where you have to air-dash all over the place and can’t be a millimeter off or you die.

    • In the fighting game scene, reaction time is studied, and the 40+ year olds can hang with the kids at the highest level. Your reaction time is a function of your focus. If you put your mind to it, yadda yadda yadda. Then it’s just up to you to decide if it’s worth sticking to it or getting to bed so you’re well-rested for work in the morning, because that’s what will separate you from beating Hollow Knight in your 40s.

      • Personally I got through the “standard” white palace (not the side path. Fuck that).

        But I never could beat the Radiance. It’s fast, its attack hitboxes are completely bonkers, and I absolutely hate the fact I can’t properly train against it to make sense of its patterns. Because every time I lose I have to redo that stupid Hollow Knight section again. It’s not even a hard part, it’s just wasting my time and making me more nervous when I have to face the real deal.

  • Jedi Fallen Order. I’ve tried a couple times because I really WANT to like the game. But I just can’t stand the fucking souls style of everything comes back when you save. And the boss fights are just too punishing (for me). It’s so frustrating to get stuck on a boss or lost in a zone and come to the realization that I WAS having fun and then the game got in the way of that.

    Elden Ring. I had a lot of fun with the game restarting and playing through the first zone on like 6 different characters to try different styles and see what I like. But at some point in the second zone I realized I was just stressed out all the time. It wasn’t fun, it was stressful. I can appreciate the game and I don’t regret spending the money on it, but I realized it just wasn’t for me.

    I think I’m done with souls games. They’re just not for me. I really wanted to play Jedi Survivor but I suspect the new cool stuff will just make me more frustrated with the souls aspects, Oh well.

    • I really wanted to like JFO but I just hated the combat mechanics, it almost seemed like it was lightsaber fighting underwater with how sluggish it seemed, and I hated the number of times I died early on from basic beasts just because you can’t break a 3-button combo so if they dodge ever so slightly that’s a good 2-3 seconds they have to lunge attack.

  • Dark Souls and souls games in general. But the difficulty is just half of it. I have beaten hard games before. The problem is that everything is so bleak I can’t even feel motivated to try. I’ll do a thing only for some NPC to go “it doesn’t matter, everything is pointless and you’re so insignificant”. Inevitably being spoiled I know that even the single optimistic NPC is not getting it great. Y’all can mope, I’m gonna put my effort where it’s appreciated.

  • So so so many. Right off the top of my head:

    • Guild Wars Season 2, one of the later missions. It was stealth gameplay. I hate stealth. Paid someone 100g to run it for me.
    • FTL’s boss.
    • Warframe’s Glassmaker season fight with Nihil.
    • Currently, Ace Combat 7’s Pipeline Destruction.
  • I usually never complete the “extreme” challenges present in some games, like path of pain and the pantheons in Hollow Knight, or the B-sides in Celeste. I try them, but when I realize that completion will require lot of time and effort, I really don’t feel bothered enough. But I’m ok with that because this kind of stuff is optional, and it’s actually cool seeing more talented gamers deal with them

  • Minecraft, I tried summoning and defeating the Wither and was woefully unprepared. The entire world near the fight was filled with craters from the explosions. I was getting ready to throw the entire world away. Then I decided to just cheat and turn Creative Mode on for 1 second, the Wither disappeared and I was able to continue playing, now with PTSD.

    It didn’t help that I was playing on Bedrock (switch), which apparently has a much more difficult fight than in the Java edition.

  • Back in my teens one summer, I was playing Resident Evil Code Veronica by day at my friend’s house and Doom 3 alone in my basement at night, got about halfway through both but quit because of the constant nightmares. Lost to the psychological damage I guess.

  • I have this weird thing where I love a game to be challenging because it’s not engaging if it’s easy, it makes the game boring to me, but at the same time I despise grinding and generally rote gameplay with the only purpose of amassing more points to be able to challenge the next boss. But very few RPGs I like are like that. Baldurs Gate 1/2 are excellent games that I love but I get extremely frustrated by some encounters which just feels like absolute bullshit and require extreme grinding or going off to do a myriad of side quests to bump up your level. Same holds true for Pillars of Eternity which I also love.

    Though I tend to be a stubborn person so I generally come back a week or month later if I get stuck but I tend to put the game down once I’ve dealt with the immediate challenge and realize that I need to do all that boring stuff again for the next boss and then I just don’t start.

    • I definitely had that experience with Baldur’s Gate 2, but I’m about 20 hours into Pillars of Eternity so far and very much not having that experience. Pillars seems to give me all the information I need to know to get through an encounter while BG2 will just say “weapon had no effect” without telling you that this monster can only be defeated by a +3 weapon.

      • Well the “early” fight with the noble / king / count can’t remember in PoE had me tearing my hair on the difficulty I played on, took intense space bar action and every trick I could muster in terms of abusing targeting and kiting, etc to win it. I don’t know how many times I reloaded and how many days I tried, must’ve been in the hundreds by the end when I finally got it due to a few lucky crits and rolls.

        • I haven’t found a noble, king, or count 20 hours in yet, but there was a quest that said I had to go fight Lord Raedric, and then I’m warned by both an NPC and a quest description that this is something I should do later because it’s going to be very difficult. Is it possible that you missed the warning and went to do something late game earlier than you should have?

          • It’s a long game, I think I just overestimated how far in you’d be at 20 hours. Since I really jammed with the game (and it was before I had 3 kids 😂) I had done all the side quests I had found but I hadn’t explored further away than the zones the side quests took you to. I will say though that plot wise it would make absolutely no sense to save it to the “late game” if that’s even possible. But that is the fight I was talking about, 100%.

  •  Snoopy   ( @Snoopy@jlai.lu ) 
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    10 months ago

    Dark Soul serie. After dying for the nth time i gave up. I don’t have enough time to red again and again the same path.

    Getting over it, well it do save your progression, especially your mistake.

    Subnautica and amesia. I fear void place and it’s too scary.

  • I had a lot of games on PS4 where the difficulty isn’t “why” I stopped, but the lengthy loads when I died was.

    I’m perfectly happy dying a bunch of times in a row, provided the deaths are fair and consistent. I have a big issue with waiting 5-10 minutes to replay a section that doesn’t last meaningfully longer than that.

    Getting a PS5 let me go back to a lot of those games and properly enjoy the brutal difficulty without the headaches.

  • If I picked Wolfenstein: The New Order back up today, I’d probably have a better time with it, since it’s been a decade since I touched it last and my gaming abilities have improved since then, but for whatever reason this game was ridiculously difficult for me, even on the easiest setting. It finally came to a point where I just couldn’t finish it, and I’m not sure if I ever will.

    • I remember it being probably the most difficult shooter I had ever played up until that point. The campaign was genuinely so hard. I (barely) managed to beat it and the boss fight at the end took me real life months.