Challenging But Rewarding — The Hardest Games That Are Worth Playing

The debate over the concept of difficulty in games has got to be one of the medium's most enduring controversies. After decades of games progressively getting easier and easier, concurrent with games becoming an ever bigger and bigger business, FromSoftware came around with Dark Souls and completely flipped the script on how both gamers and developers thought of intentionally difficult games. Sure, NES games were inherently challenging as home conversions of arcade classics, maintaining the quarter-eating challenge of their coin-op counterparts, but Dark Souls was something very different. This was a game that, like a few select titles before it, intended for its challenge to be a core part of the experience. Today, being a difficult game is almost seen as a badge of honor, with these titles using their challenging but rewarding gameplay to stand tall as some of the most fulfilling games out there.

• Release Date — November 20, 2024
• Developer — GSC Game World
• Publisher — GSC Game World
• Genre — FPS, Survival Horror
• Review Aggregate Score — 73% (Mixed or Average)
• Platforms — PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S

It took years of development and persistence through an actual war for GSC Game World to deliver S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and when it did, it obviously put some of that experience into the gameplay. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 really emphasizes the "survival" in survival horror, making it a point to underscore that every encounter in the Zone can be fatal given the right circumstances or lack of preparation. Heck, even just coming across an anomaly without your tracker equipped can be enough to land you on the Game Over screen. And with no RPG systems or real progression to speak of, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 forces you to break the sense that you're playing something like Fallout by often encouraging you to avoid combat when possible. But underneath those hardships is an apocalypse simulator like no other and one of the best tactical shooters out there.

• Release Date — February 12, 1988
• Developer — Konami
• Publisher — Konami
• Genre — Run 'n Gun
• Review Aggregate Score — 90% (Universal Acclaim)
• Platforms — NES

Sure, you can input the infamous "Konami Code" and be set with 30 lives to make your way through Contra's 8 stages (which, coincidentally, replenish with each continue), but the real challenge of this classic NES run 'n gun comes from attempting to beat the game with just the stock 4 lives you're given. It's something that can be done with plenty of practice and an understanding of each stage's enemy placements and attack patterns, but you're not going to get there without plenty of repeated failures and restarts. But when a game is as continually fun and challenging as Contra, it's a privilege to be able to play and replay it as you master each stage and come to grips with its intentionally difficult gauntlet to stop the evil Red Falcon. Even better when you get to do it with a friend in co-op.

• Release Date — February 19, 2013
• Developer — PlatinumGames
• Publisher — Konami
• Genre — Action
• Review Aggregate Score — 80% (Generally Favorable)
• Platforms — PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Truth be told, most of PlatinumGames' character action titles actually err on the easier side compared to others (at least on the standard difficulty), which makes Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance's extreme difficulty kind of shocking at first. But, considering how incredibly well-balanced and fun Rising's deflection-heavy sword combat is, that difficulty is a hurdle that's worth acclimating to and, eventually, overcoming. If you can stick it out through Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance's harsh learning curve, what you're gifted with is one of the best and most off-the-wall action games in PlatinumGames' catalog, and that's saying something.

• Release Date — July 12, 2012
• Developer — Nigoro
• Publisher — Playism
• Genre — Metroidvania, Puzzle
• Review Aggregate Score — 87% (Generally Favorable)
• Platforms — PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation Vita, Wii

By their very nature, most Metroidvania games aren't that difficult. After all, the whole genre is predicated on gradually building up the player's toolkit with new abilities and upgrades that recontextualize how you interact with a game's world and enemies, providing a palpable power curve that's immensely satisfying. That said, La Mulana is what you get when a game takes that general premise and completely throws it out the window. Everything in La Mulana is out to kill you, to the point where making a false move while trying to solve a head-scratching puzzle can lead to instant death as much as accidentally falling from too high up. The puzzles are incredibly obtuse and labyrinthine, but that's just half of La Mulana's difficulty, as the other half are the absolutely brutal enemies and bosses you'll need to overcome.

• Release Date — September 29, 2017
• Developer — Studio MDHR
• Publisher — Studio MDHR
• Genre — Run 'n Gun
• Review Aggregate Score — 86% (Generally Favorable)
• Platforms — PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One

If you thought games like Contra were hard, just wait until you try Cuphead. Part run 'n gun and part bullet hell boss rush, Cuphead is a side-scrolling shooter built around high-spectacle boss encounters that push the players' skills to their utmost limit. Imagine if Dark Souls were a shooter and you're pretty much on the mark. But if you can persist and overcome the immense challenge that many of Cuphead's bosses provide, there's nothing quite like that sense of satisfaction that comes after. The challenge of Cuphead is the point of what makes the game so special, and it also helps to underscore how well-designed each of its many boss encounters is. Plus, the first time through Cuphead, you'll inevitably struggle, only to be parrying shots and killing bosses in no-hit runs on subsequent playthroughs.

• Release Date — January 25, 2018
• Developer — Maddy Makes Games
• Publisher — Maddy Makes Games
• Genre — Platformer
• Review Aggregate Score — 92% (Universal Acclaim)
• Platforms — PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One

When thinking of the most challenging precision platformers, it's a toss-up between Super Meat Boy and Celeste as far as which is truly the hardest. But in terms of which of the two provides a more rewarding and meaningful experience to back up that challenge, the nod absolutely goes to Celeste. Even when stages are seemingly impossible, you'll eventually work within the confines of Celeste's impressive mechanics to suss out a solution simply because you're invested in the story. It also helps that Celeste has a bit of modular difficulty at play, with the experience being more forgiving for players who just want to see it through as opposed to those who are attempting to complete every optional challenge and find every hidden collectible. Either approach is valid, and you're bound to have a blast with Celeste's silky smooth platforming regardless of completion percentage.

• Release Date — March 22, 2019
• Developer — FromSoftware
• Publisher — Activision
• Genre — Action-Adventure, Soulslike
• Review Aggregate Score — 90% (Universal Acclaim)
• Platforms — PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

After years of producing challenging action RPGs that were built around the concept of challenging but rewarding gameplay, FromSoftware somehow topped itself with one of the best combat systems ever devised in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. What sets Sekiro apart from games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or even Elden Ring is that every player starts with the same set of tools. There are no "builds", per se, only a predetermined set of skills and abilities that players have to learn, and eventually, master as they attempt to complete one harrowing boss fight after another. Completing Sekiro is one of the greatest challenges in gaming, but there are few things as rewarding as the sense of accomplishment you'll feel after successfully facing off against Sword Saint Isshin in a 1v1 duel.

• Release Date — February 5, 2016
• Developer — Firaxis Games
• Publisher — 2K
• Genre — Turn-Based Tactics
• Review Aggregate Score — 88% (Generally Favorable)
• Platforms — Android, iOS, PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One

You might not think of tactics games as being all that challenging, but XCOM 2 is a game that will change your perception of that matter. The real enemy in XCOM 2 is not the alien menace that has colonized Earth, but rather the game's oftentimes cruel RNG, which will regularly have your units miss a shot with 80% or higher accuracy. Throw in the fact that death in XCOM 2 is permanent, and you'll really start to feel the beads of sweat forming as you head into each new encounter with the threat of losing one of your favorite commandoes looming large. But overcoming the odds and emerging victorious in any one of XCOM 2's tense and tactical battles is also incredibly rewarding, which is why most TRPGs have since tried to emulate its gameplay formula wholesale.

• Release Date — February 25, 2022
• Developer — FromSoftware
• Publisher — Bandai Namco
• Genre — Action RPG, Soulslike
• Review Aggregate Score — 96% (Universal Acclaim)
• Platforms — PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

Elden Ring might technically be the "easiest" of FromSoftware's Soulsborne games, but that's only because it gives players so much flexibility in how they choose to approach each new area or encounter. Underneath that flexibility, and with the right conditions, many of the actual fights in Elden Ring are some of the hardest boss encounters that FromSoftware has ever designed, which means they're also some of the most thrilling and rewarding. There's something incredibly satisfying about perfecting a build, chasing down a perfect weapon that scales well with your stats, and then taking it into a grand new biome of The Lands Between to face off against a foe that pushes your skills to their limit. It's the same formula FromSoft has implemented since Demon's Souls, but in Elden Ring, it's refined to near-perfection.

• Release Date — December 10, 1993
• Developer — id Software
• Publisher — id Software, Bethesda Softworks
• Genre — FPS
• Review Aggregate Score — 83% (Generally Favorable)
• Platforms — Android, iOS, PC, PlayStation, PS3, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

It might be a bit of a surprise to see the original Doom on a list of challenging games, but it's important to remember that Doom has always featured a wide range of difficulty options. As serious Doom players can attest, playing the game on Nightmare difficulty is a challenge that's not easily overcome, and it regularly offers some of the most satisfying gameplay that Doom is capable of delivering. It's only on Nightmare mode where players will be forced to not only master the mechanics of maneuvering DoomGuy, but also memorize stage layouts, know where the "monster closets" appear, and hunt down every secret area to collect precious health and ammo pickups that are the difference between survival and death. That's the "true" Doom experience, and once you've cracked it, there's no going back.

• Release Date — March 24, 2015
• Developer — FromSoftware
• Publisher — Sony Computer Entertainment
• Genre — Action RPG, Soulslike
• Review Aggregate Score — 92% (Universal Acclaim)
• Platforms — PlayStation 4

Many players (myself included) consider Bloodborne to be FromSoftware and Hidetaka Miyazaki's magnum opus, and a large contingent of that praise hinges on the game's immensely difficult and rewarding gameplay. Bloodborne asks players to completely forget everything they know about previous FromSoftware games (like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls) in favor of adopting a more aggressive style of play that favors speed and mobility over cautious stamina management and defensive posturing. That shift in mindset is hard to wrap your head around at first, but once it clicks, the combat in Bloodborne truly shines like nothing else in the FromSoftware catalog. Plus, some of the best and most difficult bosses FromSoftware has ever designed call Bloodborne home, especially the Old Hunters DLC.

• Release Date — August 25, 2023
• Developer — FromSoftware
• Publisher — Bandai Namco
• Genre — Action, Shooter
• Review Aggregate Score — 86% (Generally Favorable)
• Platforms — PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

You'd be forgiven for forgetting that one of FromSoftware's earliest hits was the Armored Core franchise, which made the studio's return to the IP after years of Soulsborne success a majorly hyped event. A lot of players went in expecting Soulsborne with mechs, and while some of the experience of making the Soulsborne games informed aspects of Armored Core VI's design, it's definitely not that. Instead, Armored Core VI is a challenging but rewarding mech game where your knowledge of its systems and mechanics acts like a sort of cheat code for understanding how to easily overcome what might initially seem like an impossible encounter. The boss fights of Armored Core VI are high-spectacle, adrenaline-infused affairs that are the game's highlight, but the regular gameplay in stages is just as great with an optimized AC assembly.

• Release Date — September 4, 2025
• Developer — Team Cherry
• Publisher — Team Cherry
• Genre — Metroidvania, Soulslike
• Review Aggregate Score — 91% (Universal Acclaim)
• Platforms — PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

It's hard to play Hollow Knight: Silksong and feel like Team Cherry went into its design with the intention of turning off players. Silksong is immediately and obviously much more difficult and unforgiving than Hollow Knight, but at the same time, it's also a much more ambitious and intricately designed game. It's painfully clear how much passion went into every single aspect Hollow Knight: Silksong's development, and the intentional bump to the game's difficulty is there mostly to compensate for how capable a protagonist Hornet is. She's faster and better equipped than The Knight, and the enemies in Silksong have upped their ante accordingly. The jump from Act II to Act III is one of the steepest difficulty curves in gaming, but if you can acclimate, it makes the end of Hollow Knight: Silksong an experience that you'll find hard to top from any other modern Metroidvania.

• Release Date — September 20, 2005
• Developer — Team Ninja
• Publisher — Koei Tecmo
• Genre — Action
• Review Aggregate Score — 94% (Universal Acclaim)
• Platforms — Xbox

Long before the release of even Demon's Souls (much less Dark Souls), the original template and poster child for "difficult" games was Tomonobu Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden. Ninja Gaiden was built on the foundations of the same fighting game systems that Itagaki had designed for the Dead or Alive series, which made its combat much more complex and nuanced than other similar games like Devil May Cry or God of War. Ninja Gaiden Black only improved on the original Xbox version of Ninja Gaiden with some rebalancing in key areas, making certain sections harder while others were made easier. Combat and boss encounters in Ninja Gaiden Black will punish players for not attempting to master the game's mechanics, but the trade-off is that you'll walk away from completing these battles with a sense of accomplishment that few other games can provide.

• Release Date — September 22, 2011
• Developer — FromSoftware
• Publisher — Bandai Namco
• Genre — Action RPG
• Review Aggregate Score — 89% (Generally Favorable)
• Platforms — PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

For a game to still be rewarding despite presenting an intense challenge to the player, there has to be some give and take in its systems that make those hardships worthwhile. Dark Souls is perhaps the perfect example of this dichotomy, as the game repeatedly puts up one stumbling block after another while simultaneously making its adventure exponentially more rewarding the further along you get. You'll suffer through the darkness and despair of Sen's Fortress, only to emerge in the glistening halls of Anor Londo, ready to do it all over again with a different build that transforms your play style and approach to the game's encounter design. Dark Souls is endlessly rewarding, and that's with its propensity to actively work against the player at every opportunity.