ideo games are natural predators. In the earliest incarnation of the art — the arcade cabinets scattered across movie-theater lobbies and dentist waiting rooms in the ’70s and ’80s — you’d exchange a quarter for three lives and a dream. A few minutes later, once those ghosts claimed Pac-Man’s soul, or after Jumpman tripped over one too many of Donkey Kong’s barrels, you were sent back to your mother, tail between your legs, in hopes that she had a bit more spare change left in her purse. This was the business model; video games attempted to separate kids from their allowances as efficiently as possible, which was most easily accomplished through the blunt force of difficulty.
The modern home console-based games industry is almost unrecognizable compared to those early days. Extra lives are no longer stingily meted out between checkpoints, an easy mode is usually only a toggle away, and generally speaking publishers are more interested in immersing us in a story rather than humbling us with our inadequacies. And yet, even now, gamers have a grudging appreciation for a really tough level. They may not be as common as they were in the old days, when there was a direct financial incentive in thwarting players, but plenty of studios still crank up the meters to 11, eager to break our thumbs in two. In fact, with the mainstream success of games like Elden Ring and Returnal, difficulty seems to be coming back into fashion. We’re here to celebrate the tradition and hopefully get some closure on our collective anguish.
There are so many different ways to create a hard level. This list contains resource-draining RPG grinds, uncompromising tactical grids, mind-melting adventure-game puzzles, and the sort of quicksilver, arcade-y gauntlets that require a speedrunner’s acumen. (It does not contain, we want to note, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which came out too recently for us to confidently make a determination about whether any of its challenges warrant a spot. We reserve the right to add it at a later date.) We only looked at console and/or PC games released in the U.S. — meaning no arcade games (unless they were ported to a console) and no mobile-first games — and we created a few rules to guide our selections:
➼ The Flappy Bird Rule: Levels have a clear beginning and end.
➼ The Open-World Rule: As game styles evolve, so do level styles. Side quests can be levels; discrete sections of a map can be levels (as long as they follow the Flappy Bird Rule.)
➼ The ’90s Disney Games Rule: Intended audience matters. If a game was targeting young kids, how difficult was this level to that particular cohort?
In general, we attempted to weigh a given level’s difficulty relative to the rest of the game and relative to other games in its genre. Each level’s difficulty was considered in the context of when the game was released — How hard was this when it came out? — since subsequent accumulation of knowledge, online resources, simplified rereleases, and better technology have made some of these stages more manageable over time. The impact of technology was taken into account, too: The difficulty of some games on the list was compounded by the inadequate controllers of their era.
Preference was given to levels that are honorable with their difficulty; a good, satisfying hard, rather than “Are we sure this isn’t a bug?” hard. This was tougher to suss out when reflecting on gaming’s Cretaceous period, specifically the death traps that tormented us on the NES. Is Battletoads a well-designed game? That’s a question we could spend another 20,000 words trying to answer. Enjoy the list, and please tread carefully and stay hydrated if you tackle any of these levels yourself.
100.Lavender Town
Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow (1996; Game Boy)
Photo: Game Freak
When Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue — the first entries in the creature-catching franchise — came to the U.S. from Japan in 1998, gamers couldn’t just Google the best strategies, especially when it came to how best to use different types of Pokémon against each other. Instead, as players traveled around trying to “catch ’em all,” they had to learn which Pokémon were most effective in battle against other types. Some matchups are fairly intuitive: Water, as you might expect, beats Fire. Others, such as Bug beating Psychic, relied entirely on trial and error.
It was in this information vacuum that Lavender Town proved to be such a huge challenge. The spectral Pokémon Gastly and Haunter, which populate the spooky tower, are impossible to even fight without first completing a side quest in a different town. Then, once you are able to battle them, it’s still notably difficult. These part-Ghost, part-Poison types have unintuitive weaknesses (especially since one of them, Ghost type itself, is extremely rare and there are no good damaging-Ghost moves in the game). Would-be Pokémon masters used up all their potions while battling their way up a maze-like tower. And then you had to fight your hated rival, again, at the top. Lavender Town might not hold up as an especially difficult level a couple decades later, when resources such as Bulbapedia contain all the type matchups a player needs. But our desperate memories will haunt us forever.
99.No Russian
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009; PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360)
Photo: Demonware
No Russian became controversial the moment footage of the level leaked a month ahead of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s November 2009 release. Taken out of context, it appeared that players would be joining up with terrorists to gun down innocent civilians in a Moscow airport. In context, as everyone discovered when they got their hands on the game … that’s more or less exactly what happens.
When the level arrives early in MW2, you’re in the perspective of one of the game’s five player characters, the CIA agent Joseph Allen. He’s assigned to go undercover and infiltrate a terrorist group in order to gain the trust of Vladimir Makarov, the group’s leader and the game’s main antagonist. You can’t reveal your true identity, even as you watch Makarov’s men massacre scores of helpless people at the airport.
It’s hard to play, for reasons that have nothing to do with mechanics; tellingly, the game offers the option to skip the mission entirely. Plenty of mainstream games ask you to make difficult, emotionally devastating choices. The Mass Effect series is full of them, often leading to no-win scenarios. Life Is Strange ends with a decision to either sacrifice the girl you love or let your entire town be destroyed. (See also Valkyria Chronicles 4’s Mission 16 below.) But in No Russian, you have no agency. No matter what you do, you can’t stop the devastation. If you try to take out the terrorists, you fail the mission and have to start all over again. In the end, you’re left feeling emotionally spent, and the sacrifice doesn’t even matter: You’re found out, Allen is killed, and you simply continue the story as one of the other four characters. All of that death and sacrifice was for nothing. It might be the most apt statement Call of Duty has ever made about war.
98.The Club
Sifu (2022; PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows)
The cinematic beat-em-up Sifu, which was inspired by martial-arts movies, has an intriguing premise: Each time you die while battling through the game’s five levels, you’re revived — but your character has aged a few years. Eventually you reach old age, and your next death will be your last, sending you back to the beginning of the game to start all over again. It’s a neat mechanic, if an occasionally frustrating one — especially since Sifu’s second level, The Club, unleashes such a dramatic difficulty spike that you’ll be lucky to finish it with only a smattering of gray hairs and wrinkles.
The Club opens in furious style, a brawl on the dance floor accompanied by composer Howie Lee’s pummeling soundtrack. From there, the game throws an ever-escalating series of opponents at you: Two gigantic henchmen guarding the backstage entrance; a pack of bruising cage fighters; a pair of staff-wielding martial artists; to cap it off, a showdown with the dojo master himself. The Club is so difficult compared to Sifu’s first level that, in the week after the game’s release, it was reported that only a third of players made it through. How many other second levels can lay claim to having driven away the majority of its player base?
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