What’s the most egregious example of a difficulty spike in any video game you’ve played?

[Whiskey]

Darksider 2. In the intro town there is this fat man who you can challenge to a fight. All his attacks are one shot massive aoes. Killed him after an hour and shot up a dozen levels. Zero idea why he was in the first town after the tutorial

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

FTL

Smooth sailing, then final boss is a powerhouse with 6 phases that requires at least a superb build otherwise it will completely decimate you before you land a single hit.

 

[Seventh Star]

Sonny 2 isn't too bad until Baron Brixius which took me years and some guides to figure out how to beat, and even then it is designed like shit. The literal faggot will heal all the way back to full if you damage him too much while inflicting instakills and debuffs on your party, while you're supossed to kill him with whatever skill you have that reverses healing. You have three trees and I'm not even sure all of them have a skill like that. You have to grind a lot and still figure out how to kill him. Maybe I was just a retarded kid, I dunno, but no part of the main game is as hard as this motherfucker, and he's in the 2nd world/act/location, you stumble into him right away.

 

[Scarthew]

Bug fables' hardest boss is in chapter 3/6 and its the chapter's mid-boss. Lisa the painful RPG's opening hour is probably the most difficult of that game since you get far more utilities toward the end.

I'm not complaining though I think a non-standard difficulty progression often works really well. Peaks and dips in difficulty can be used to create more varried experience rather than just an uphill climb. Not to say having the final boss be the most difficult or the super optional boss post game is a bad idea either just that following a hard rule all the time limits games.

Sonny 2 isn't too bad until Baron Brixius

You are talking about the flash game by godlimations right? Im not crazy assuming this right now?

 

[Seventh Star]

You are talking about the flash game by godlimations right? Im not crazy assuming this right now?

Yes I am.

 

[Kirklandwarrior]

The race car level in Mafia. I know some many people that got filtered by that level when I was a kid.

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

Bladewolf.
Monsoon.
Sundowner.
Armstrong.
DLC Armstrong.
Duriel.

 

[1Tonka_Truck]

Eve Online. You either survived to the plateau or quit.

 

[God of Nothing]

Sonny 2 isn't too bad until Baron Brixius which took me years and some guides to figure out how to beat, and even then it is designed like shit. The literal faggot will heal all the way back to full if you damage him too much while inflicting instakills and debuffs on your party, while you're supossed to kill him with whatever skill you have that reverses healing. You have three trees and I'm not even sure all of them have a skill like that. You have to grind a lot and still figure out how to kill him. Maybe I was just a retarded kid, I dunno, but no part of the main game is as hard as this motherfucker, and he's in the 2nd world/act/location, you stumble into him right away.

You never figured that out?
I went with the edgy zombie powers every time. Seemed like the exact thing to do. Retrograde, I think. God, I fucking loved that game.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Library of Ruina has one pretty much every chapter, though I don't know if it counts when the game is more of a puzzle than skill based

 

[I Know 孤独のせい]

Yakuza 4 - Final Final boss fight. All the worst side effects of Yakuzas combat combined into one godawful shitshow. Uninstalled the game after I got Tekken juggled for the billionth time.
Arx Fatalis - Must have been programmed in the last minutes of development. Life drain and self-healing plus spawning mobs made for some "fun" times. Managed to levitate on some random piece of geometry and unloaded arrows for half an hour, and got one sword stroke in to seal the deal. Left a bad taste in my mouth for a rather great game.

 

[D.Angus]

>Playing a puzzle mobile game after some time, clearing stage after stage
>Game rewards you for doing well with bonus powerups
>Start board, already see some prime moves already
>Animated character comes onto screen, winks at the camera before placing shitty powerups on primo spots
>Lose stage
>"Would you like to pay to continue or purchase powerups?"

 

[Seventh Star]

You never figured that out?
I went with the edgy zombie powers every time. Seemed like the exact thing to do. Retrograde, I think. God, I fucking loved that game.

To be fair I was like 8 and I didn't know wtf an RPG was. The Psychological tree iirc had it easy and less convoluted with Retrograde, with the other builds you had to do some retarded ass combo to reverse the healing.

 

[God of Nothing]

To be fair I was like 8 and I didn't know wtf an RPG was. The Psychological tree iirc had it easy and less convoluted with Retrograde, with the other builds you had to do some retarded ass combo to reverse the healing.

silly sonny
should've gone edgy super zombie

Since I'm here and replaying Arcanum, the fucking Dwarf clan lair. Have fun dealing with enemies that break your weapons. Hope you bought enough fatigue potions to wade through an ocean of blood.

 

[Ensok]

Not the most egregious ever but definitely the most recent one I can think of is for a couple of levels in Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. It's an RTS similar to Age of Empires 2 that I started playing again recently after having it when I was younger as a kid. There are two levels that stand out:

1. The Bonus Mission for the Trade Federation campaign. Since it's the Bonus Mission and the last level of the campaign it naturally should be the hardest but I feel it still counts as a difficulty spike because the Trade Federation campaign is the first one in the game. You have the option to play them in any order but chronologically it's the first and it's also labelled as the first one. Either way this mission is a nightmare. It's a recreation of the climactic battle against the Gungans in Episode I except you play as the Trade Federation and your goal is to wipe them out. At first it doesn't seem too hard at all but then you come to the end where you have to fight through a choke point filled with the strongest Gungan mechs along with their shield generators. Oh and the Gungan mechs outrange anything you have. There's also the fact that there's no buildings or resources in this mission, you only get what you start out with along with Darth Maul as a hero unit and a couple of med droids near the beginning. It's by far the hardest mission in the entire game and even on Easy I wasn't able to beat it without cheating.

2. The third mission for the Confederacy campaign. This is in the expansion pack but what's funny is that the first two missions are blisteringly easy, two of the easiest missions in the entire game. But then you suddenly get thrown into this one and you have to defeat a heavily entrenched opponent with a massive military force and a lot of Jedi that can convert your units to their side. They will also continuously attack and poke at you so you need to build up your defenses a lot. What really makes this tedious though is that because the way the game works you need to have prefab shelters built to be allowed to create more units. Well at the start of this mission you have no workers or base and instead just a big military force. So when you finally get a few workers and start your base you're literally unable to build any extra workers to speed things up and it horribly slows things down until you've got a ton of extra shit built. It's not nearly as difficult as the Trade Federation Bonus Mission or probably even the toughest Confederacy mission, it's just a miserable slog and way tougher than the previous missions.

 

[Scarthew]

Oh i got a good one, deck 1 in system shock 2. No matter how you build youll have an answer for the self destructing robots (energy pistol, ap rounds, emp grenades) but theres so many of them and its so early that it makes you often choose to run from them to save resources.

It's also is one of the places where psi characters really shine because pyro field makes you immune to explosive damage so that your own aoe doesnt hurt you which allows you to just walk up to the robots.

Again its a perfect example of a spike leading to more interesting gameplay, its like how fromsoft likes to put their poison swamps early because if they came later your health bar is too large for it to be a threat and affording resources to deal with it doesnt cut into your money in a meaningful way.

or how pokemon would front load its poison forests for the same reason (when pokemon was about adventuring in a harsh world) These endurance tests dont work when you have 99 potions which is why rpgs scale their late games to longer fights instead of more fights because at least in combat using a potion costs a turn.

 

[Tims]

The one for me was the Amygdala boss in the cursed chalice in Bloodbourne, really enjoying the game... Then a two day roadblock, had to become a god gamer to beat it. Admittedly once I did I steam rolled the rest of the game.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

surprised this was not posted yet.

 

[PonderosaPete]

Then was a game series on game cube called Baten Kaitos. Both games were two disk and both games second disk starts with a super difficult boss fight. You could get soft locked here because you're in a dungeon you can't leave and can only level up in towns. Had to restart both games because I didn't grind, nor learn my lesson.

Special mention to Drakengard 1 & 3 for being action games that end in rhythm game boss fights.

Dragon dogmas late game was a good thrill and very much welcomed.

 

[Flat Assessment]

The enemy scaling in Borderlands 2's new game plus is completely fucked. The first time you finish the game and do ng+ things scale in fairly reasonable manner, but after that the enemies become fridges made of cement that can eat 10 sniper rounds to the head and one shot you. To compensate for this enemies have higher elemental weaknesses, but that just means you're probably going to have to juggle a bunch of annoying dogshit weapons just to have a chance at killing even the weakest enemies.