hardest

The most fascinating thing about the history of difficult PC games isn’t necessarily the difficulty of individual titles but rather the diversity of difficult experiences the platform has gifted us throughout the years. From meme games specifically designed to make you rage quit to underrated platformers and punishing puzzle titles, the history of difficult PC games essentially doubles as a fairly comprehensive look at all the ways developers have creatively punished us for daring to think we were ever good enough to beat their cruelest creations. What are the most difficult PC games ever made, though? Well, answering that question…

In their move from the NES to the SNES, Nintendo and its development partners often relied on using 8-bit games as the basis for 16-bit innovations. While that approach helped move us towards the future of gaming, it also meant that many SNES games felt spiritually similar to NES titles. That also means that many SNES games retained that arcade-like difficulty that would, in some ways, define over a decade of gaming. While the average SNES game didn’t feature nearly as many of the technical and design hurdles that contributed to some of the most difficult NES games ever made,…

With the recently released Cyber Shadow, publisher Yacht Club Games (the studio behind the brilliant Shovel Knight) prove that they’re the masters of revitalizing those brutally difficult NES games that defined an era and haunt gamers to this day. The absurd difficulty of the average NES game can be attributed to a variety of factors, but the fact remains that there’s a reason the term “NES Hard” exists in the gaming lexicon. The hardest NES games weren’t just difficult: they were nightmarish excursions into another world where demands for perfect inputs met fundamentally unforgiving (and sometimes simply terrible) game design.…