What is the appeal of the unbeatable game? Since the first generations of consoles, players have been almost compulsively drawn to games that are impossible to master. The idea of a video game you may throw hundreds of hours into only to never win seems almost nonsensical in a medium where making progress is usually key to unlocking all of a game’s story. And yet often impossible games are the ones with the most avid, dedicated fanbase.
We’ve crossed the decades to pick the most impossible games to master, from poorly designed side scrollers to sparkling new exclusives for the PS5, that will keep you screaming in frustration for hours on end.
Returnal (2021)
Returnal is one of the hardest big-name games released in the last year. Released in April, Returnal is a big budget roguelike/roguelite game for the PS5. For those prone to dying a lot in video games the genre can be particularly painful, as the central feature of the genre is ‘permadeath’ or some version of it, which forces the player to reset their progress to the beginning each and every time they die. In Returnal, that mechanic is the central part of the plot as astronaut-protagonist Selene finds herself crash-landed on an alien planet in a time loop that is restarted each time she dies.
What makes this AAA incarnation particularly more challenging compared to other roguelike or roguelite games like The Binding of Isaac or Hades is its length. Hours more gameplay go into Returnal over most indie roguelike games, meaning every time you die can mean losing hours, not minutes, of game time, not to mention a good chunk of your own sanity.
Takeshi’s Challenge (1986)
For those familiar with the cult classic gameshow Takeshi’s Castle, where tens of players compete increasingly absurd and troublesome tasks, you can probably imagine what a video game named for the show’s titular creator Takeshi Kitano might be like. Now imagine something much, much more painful.
The 1986 action-adventure side scroller for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sees the player become an office worker who finds a treasure map and embarks on a quest to find the treasure. So far, so normal. But before you can even search for the treasure the game forces you to beat up the old man who gave you the map, quit your job and divorce your wife.
Thanks to some very brutal design, failing to do any of these seemingly inconsequential actions will lead to a game over. As will drinking water in a bar, failing to leave the controller untouched for hours at a time, failing to squat at certain random locations, not attacking random civilians or not singing well enough to a Karaoke song. Now imagine trying to navigate all that sadistic punishment in the 1980s, without the help of online walkthroughs.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1986)
This text adventure game, an adaption of the world famous series of novels from Douglas Adams, is seen by many as one of the best classic PC games of all time. The game follows the plot of the first book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, with the player taking the role of Arthur Dent and being forced to solve an array of puzzles to win.
Effectively capturing the series’ trademark wry, absurd humour (Adams himself helped design the game), it’s infamous for being devilishly impossible to win. That challenge is epitomised by one puzzle early in the game. The player has to use an array of unrelated items in a seemingly random order to get a Babel Fish out of a dispenser on a Vogon ship. The puzzle has a limited amount of turns to be solved in, and while failing wouldn’t kill you, it would ruin the rest of the game. Without the babel fish to translate for the player, the game would become unwinnable, as a subsequent puzzle is reliant on you being able to translate Vogon instructions to determine the correct password. Find a BBC port of the original game here.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019)
For many this is a controversial choice to include, above the original Dark Souls game from 2011, but the most recent release by Japan’s FromSoftware is one of the most difficult games of the last few years. In it, you play as the shinobi (or ninja) Sekiro, who is fighting with a mixture of stealth and combat to take revenge on a rival clan who have kidnapped his lord. Both it and the infamously difficult Dark Souls series (FromSoftware relishes in creating hard to master games) possess brutal boss battles, refuse to offer anything other than one incredibly hard difficulty mode, punish the player for dying and more.
But what potentially sets Sekiro apart is its choice to move away from improvable stats. In Dark Souls, if a boss is too much you can spend time grinding to improve your Vigor, Strength, Endurance etc. until you are strong enough to win. In Sekiro, gaining experience only adds to a skill tree, rather than improving your base stats; if you can’t beat a boss your only hope is to play better.
Dwarf Fortress (2006)
Indie construction and management simulation Dwarf Fortress, sees players in charge of building a fortress and keeping alive the dwarves who live in it. Like so many other entrants on the list, when you lose it’s permanent. To survive players have to take into account everything from environment and elevation to biome, soil types and mineral concentrations for their fortress to ensure it survives, and almost anything can spell doom for your growing fortress. Conventional attacks by goblins or dragons can lead to your destruction, but so can failing to support the mental health of the dwarf residents, who have been given complex programmed personalities. Even not giving them enough variety in the booze they drink will give them negative thoughts and increase the risk of them becoming suicidal. Despite all that, there is still no end goal to the game, no matter how much you master the world around you and the needs of your people.
Because there is absolutely no way to win, in the end every fortress is eventually destroyed by something. Its sheer impossibility has managed to give the game a cult following 15 years after initial release. It even has its own dedicated subreddit with 119,000 members with the tagline “Dwarf Fortress – Losing is fun!”.
Don’t Starve (2013)
The main aim of Don’t Starve is exactly what the title suggests. Deposited in a dark parallel world, the player is tasked with surviving the nights of this eerie hellscape, from finding food and building shelter to fighting off monsters all while keeping their health, hunger and sanity meters high. It makes it onto this list because of the sheer number of ways you are able to die: mental breakdown, spoiled food, random tentacle assault – one robotic character even loses health if left out in the rain.
And, as ever, deaths are permanent – all progress and collectibles are lost as the player is forced to start over from the beginning. Its unique Tim Burton-inspired art style and original music makes the game visually stunning, but it could well leave you losing your grip on your own sanity.
Exile: Wicked Phenomenon (1992)
How often do you think a studio can produce an almost unbeatable game by mistake? But that’s exactly what happened with 1992’s Exile: Wicked Phenomenon, a largely unheard-of Japanese RPG reproduced and localised for US audiences by studio Working Designs. The game focuses on Sadler, a Syrian Assassin who fights monsters while trying to solve the mystery of an ancient tower. Explaining the struggles in the game online nearly two decades after its release, former Working Designs studio president Victor Ireland explained the game was turned into “one of the hardest games ever – by accident”. While trying to add just one level to the difficulty of the game’s monsters, the team accidentally made their difficulty increase at an exponential rate; each being twice as hard as the last.
Super Meatboy (2010)
This platform game from Team Meat appears on pretty much every list of difficult games, and there’s good reason why. A square of sentient meat tasked with saving your girlfriend Bandage Girl from the evil Dr Fetus, the game sees you try and navigate increasingly difficult worlds with a supply of spinning deathtraps so constant it makes the Saw films feel like a children’s movie. And, as with so many other games on this list, death (which comes so, so often) forces you to restart the level in full, though the developers were kind enough to make the levels pretty short.
And while those levels restart fast, the game also relishes in reminding you just how often you have failed. Each time you die, a nice bloody stain permanently marks where you met your bitter end. And if you do ever manage to finish the game, if you want to torture yourself a little more, replay mode allows you to watch all of your countless deaths play out in unison.
Super Hexagon (2012)
Sometimes it’s the simplest games that can be the hardest. Super Hexagon is a primarily mobile game developed single-handedly by Terry Cavanagh. In it, you take control of triangle in the centre of the screen, as walls close in. The player has to pivot the triangle to the holes in those enclosing shapes; like an intense version of Hole in the Wall.
What makes this game so devilish is simply that soon the walls close in at a dizzying pace. Mix that with a thumping techno soundtrack and a constantly spinning screen that makes orienting where your little triangle is facing almost impossible, and you have the perfect recipe for a game that’s nigh on impossible to complete.
Celeste (2018)
Celeste is a platform game where the player, as protagonist Madeline, is tasked with climbing up Mount Celeste while avoiding a wide array of deadly challenges. From gaping holes to spike pits, the obstacles are simple and will be familiar to any gamer, but the difficulty of this game comes in working out the often intricate moves needed to overcome them.
But its in the story where Celeste really shines. The multiple award-winning game’s story touches on themes of mental health and overcoming your own self-doubt, all while challenging the player to beat the seemingly impossible jumps and moves required to climb the mountain. Seems fitting, no?
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
It’s not often that a game is so unredeemingly and completely terrible that it’s able to crash an entire industry, but this 80s adaption is often said to have done just that. Released by Atari on the cusp of the 1983 video game industry crash, this lacklustre adaption of the Spielberg blockbuster sold so poorly that its seen by many as the nail in the coffin of a company and an industry that was increasingly oversaturated. It was even rumoured to have sold so poorly that thousands of copies of unsold game stock was secretly dumped in a landfill in New Mexico, a story that was proven to be at least partially true after an excavation in 2014. A mixture of clunky controls and odd mechanics where you search for telephone parts inside wells and poorly-designed inescapable pits, makes navigating this 8-bit nightmare all the way to the finish an impossible task. It’s often cited as one of the worst games ever made – but for something to qualify as difficult doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be good.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
