Civ 4 on the hardest setting. You will be humbled.

Although Hollow Knight is not that dificult (if you want to avoid the DLC's and major Bosses) I highly recomend it. It has some optional major challenges that you'll want to beat!

Each boss is a challenge in it's own with interesting and creative design, indeed. Timing, precision and quick thinking... It's really fun. :)

Blood on Extra Crispy difficulty. Note that the DosBox version has a bug where loading a game reverts the enemy damage scaling back to default values of medium difficulty. There is a workaround for this in the Blood subforums.

Any Serious Sam on Serious difficulty. There is one more difficulty after serious (Mental), but it is honestly easier than Serious.

Freedom Force and Freedom Force vs. the 3rd Reich - the hardest difficulty will punish you brutally for not pausing and micro-managing your heroes constantly.

Praetorians seemed brutally difficult when I tried it a long time ago.

Enclave. When playing on the hardest difficulty, you have to finish an entire mission in one life (saving is disabled) and there are many situations where you can be one-shot, fall into an instant death pit, dangerous jumps and generally tough fights.

X-Morph Defense also requires you to be on your toes constantly on the hardest difficulty.

Etherlords 1 and 2. Hardest difficulty gives your enemies many advantages, which makes some fights brutally difficult.

tried but non for me. i remember it was very difficult

Ruiner
Easy mode is too easy and Medium is too hard. If you're somehow breezing through Hard difficulty, there's Arena mode and Speedrun mode, the latter being absolute hell.

AVICII Invector
I was already having trouble with the early tracks on Easy, the second of the 4 difficulty settings. Hard mode was too torturously difficult for me to be worth the bother. If it's somehow not enough for you, there are two DLC packs that add even harder tracks.

Frostpunk GOTY
Survivor mode requires you to execute everything perfectly, without being able to manually save and load, and without active pause.

So true... Well except the freaking Traitor Lord, that was not fun.

Regarding Cuphead, is never too much to recall this video: youtube link

this looks very interesting... star wars vibes
DA:Originis is not for me...story and characters are beautiful but i have the real time combat system. i prefer turn based system
i finished dark souls series, especially the third chapter. so easy. is it necessary to dirT rally the steering wheel or is it ok the controller'?
thanks they look very challenging, especially enclave
i've never tried a 4x strategy game, i'll try

thnaks man. Ruiner looks beautiful
added in wishlist. thanks

Btw there is an indie platformer infamous for its difficulty: Jump King.
It looks too frustrating for me, but I guess it's good for a challenge..

La-Mulana is also quite difficult. That game is basically an adventure/metroidvania hybrid, with the adventure game elements being quite prevalent and rather difficult. If anything, I think it gets too far, where I found myself having to look up the solutions to most of the puzzles (though it's interesting to figure out the logic behind their solutions afterwords.) And then there's the optional area known as hell temple.

(La-Mulana 2, to my understanding, is still difficult and still has strong adventure game elements, but it seems like, at least in the part featured in the kickstarter demo, the logic is a bit more reasonable.)

When video games were made during this time, there were companies like Blockbuster where people can rent games for a week for cheap. Disney didnt want kids to rent the games, beat them in a week, then return them so Disney told the developers to make them punishingly hard. Lion King is hard for its small hit boxes which makes platforming hard. The developers have actually apologized to fans for how hard their games are, the most "famous" being Lion King.

In general though, older games are generally harder than newer modern games.

I'd like to introduce you to this Community Wishlist: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/wizardry_15

The game you're hoping for here is Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna, which usually sits at the top of every ranked list of hardest RPGs ever made. This game was made specifically to mess with hard core players of Wizardry 1-3, which means that you need to play these three games first to the point that you're very confident about yourself before trying that one.

What makes this game hard is that Werdna is not a normal player character. He is the antagonist of the first Wizardry game in a complete role reversal as the player character. He starts out at the bottom of a dungeon that he's trying to escape with most of his powers depleted. He gains no experience from encounters and regularly runs into roving bands of heroes trying to stop him.


Elminage Gothic, which I have not played yet, has a reputation for having a difficulty more in line with Wizardry 1-3 plus 5.


The older Might and Magic games that come packaged with Might and Magic 6 were influenced by the early Wizardry games, but they are significantly easier. Even when you encounter a stack of 200+ monsters, it still isn't as bad as some of the stuff that Wizardry throws at you. If you run out of options, you might want to pick up Might and Magic 6 anyway the next time it goes on sale.

Wizardry 4 also has hardcore adventure game elements, much like La-Mulana. In fact, enough players have had trouble leaving the first room that the developers put in a slip of paper with a solution to the very first puzzle. Also worth noting that the puzzle revolves around a change in the mechanics from the previous games.

Worth noting that Wizardry 4 has a "dead man walking" situation, but, unliike with classical adventure games that pulled this on the player, Wizardry 4 actually *warns* the player, not to mention the inclusion of multiple save slots (and no auto-saving the way Wizardry 1-3 and 5 do). (Also, there's a clue you can get after the point of no return.)

By the way, the PSX version of Wizardry 4 is easier because it includes an auto-map, and much of the game's difficulty is based around that:

Incidentally, Wizardry 4 has many unusual characteristics that make the game unique, to the point where I wish there were other games like it (but easier):
* At a pentagram, you are fully restored, and you can summon 3 groups of monsters.
* The battles play like Wizardry 1-3, except that you're on the "enemy" side, and your opponents are on the "party" side. You don't get to control your monsters, but you control your own actions.
* Enemies drop al their equipment (subject to a limit, but unique items tend to be prioiritized), but items are unidentified until you pick them up (and inventory space is limited, with unclaimed items disappearing)
* You don't get experience points in this game. The only way to level up is to reach a new floor and find a pentagram on that floor.
* Even with all this, you still get to feel powerful by the end of the game, to the point where only the most powerful bands of do-gooders stand a chance against you.

(Also worth noting that the game has multiple endings.)

As long as those 200+ mosnters aren't high level monsters. 200+ Orc Gods, for example, take way too long when they have 50,000 HP each, and there's an encounter near the desert that frequently has 200+ top tier enemies (IIRC).

(Talking about Might & Magic 2 specifically, since that's the one where you fight 200+ enemies; this does not happen in 1 or 3-5.)

Then again, in the NES version of Might and Magic 1, there's Locust Plagues, which are extremely unfair in that version of the game. The battles against them play out like this, once the Locust Plague gets into the front:
* Locust Plague is fast enough to attack first.
* The enemy will attack, hitting one of your characters 9-10 times for 255 damage (due to a bug), downing them.
* Because of another bug, none of your characters will get a chance to act this round.
* At the start of the next round, the locusts will kill another of your characters, repeating the cycle.
* This continues until your entire party is dead.

(In the PC version, these two bugs aren't present, so the Locust Plague will hit for "only" 10 damage, and a downed character won't result in your whole party being unable to act this round, so the fight is reasonable in such a version, unlike NES where you can't let them get a turn or its game over.)

Might and Magic 2 happens to be the Might and Magic game that I have played the most extensively and the most times, so you can say those 200+ monster stacks were quite memorable for me. In some respects, it's not much different than the real-time RPGs where you can running around and wipe out an entire army with just one guy.