Truly difficult games

[TheArtilleryman]

"The Campaign for North Africa" is a war based board game that places huge emphasis on logistics and organisation, apparantly takes 1500+ hours to play a full game. Its pretty difficult to find any sort of breakdown on how the game is actually played, presumably because the sheer amount of things in it are impossible to go over concisely.

I'm fascinated by it, though I would never attempt to play it.

I'm kinda confused by your definition of "difficult" also and thought maybe you meant a game where it's a huge task just to get your head around it?

For computer games, Nethack has so much going on and is so easy to lose that nobody I know IRL who's played it has managed to beat it. I havent tried too much but I couldn't even get passed the first area.

 

[Calandrino]

There's a lot of "historical" (oldass games from the 90ies or the 80ies) that are hard as balls because the developers were incompetent,

I feel like instances of player incompetence are more commonplace

 

[Megaton Punch]

Imagine an army of IGN reviewers walking up to the first skeleton in Dark Souls and dying repeatedly without trying anything differently until finally ragequitting and posting about it online. That's what's going on there with a couple tutorial bosses designed to make sure you aren't playing like a spaz.

It's tougher than Hollow Knight, but that's not saying much.

The hardest thing about Hollow Knight is not giving into the urge to uninstall the game during your 75th run across the entire goddamn map. Speaking as someone who finally beat it last week, it's wild how badly designed that game was.

I can't be too mad though. It was a bunch of nobodies who had an incredible game at their fingertips and, despite clearly not understanding game design at all, still ended up making something that's very fun for about half its length. They just couldn't ignore the devil on their shoulder whispering "just copy everything from Dark Souls, that's a popular game".