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

[Idiot Doom Spiral]

Tomb Raider (original/re-master) - ‘The Cistern’ level. It is a massive jump in complexity from the preceding ‘Palace Midas’ stage, and much harder than the subsequent ‘Tomb of Tihocan’ level. The difficulty is predominantly due to having to activate a flood switch at the right time in the level, which you will only realise once you get stuck. It also is a backtracking tour-de-force and unnecessarily long.

Tomb Raider 3 - literally the second level in the game is an overly-long trap gauntlet and the only way you progress is to repeatedly die and learn. Watching Lara get crushed to death for the 16th time in one stage because you didn’t know that innocuous part of the room would close in on you gets old very fucking quickly

Resident Evil 4 (original) - the ‘Water Room’. Holy Christ; an extraordinarily long slog fighting an endless onslaught of cultists; topped off by a section of precision sniping around useless Ashley, WHILE said cultists are running at you and clubbing you over the head. Nothing up to this point in the Castle area prepares you for this; the rest of the Castle is pretty manageable save for a few Garrador shock set-pieces

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas - any of Zero’s missions; but for me, the precision required in shooting the hordes of RC planes with a fucking MINIGUN was the only GTA side mission I ever gave up on to date.

Streets of Rage 2 - Stage 5 boss R.Bear. Cheap, massive and the fastest obese man in video game history. Can also randomly body-splash you ass-first from anywhere on the screen. Every other boss in the game can be beaten with skill - including Shiva and Mr. X - but this twat requires cheesing tactics almost exclusively

Sonic The Hedgehog - Labyrinth Zone boss fight. This exercise in torture is precisely why Sega Genesis controllers were specced to be fist and window proof. Requires avoiding traps, dealing with water/running out of air, and loads of nooks you can get stuck in and die thanks to the vertically scrolling screen of death. All forms of Robotnik before and after are your basic ‘hit him a few times and dodge his latest airship contraption’

Radiant Silvergun - Stage 5/SBS-130 Battleship. This game is already a Nintendo-hard bullet-hell shooter, but this stage is fucking insanity. You are deluged with enemies and claustrophobic set pieces of 2cm safe screen areas, but you cannot shoot enemies indiscriminately. This game requires you to chain kills of enemies the same colour to power up your weapons. If you don’t, you’ll be weak as piss for the final boss fight on the next level

 

[Seventh Star]

The original Binding of Isaac had a gigantic difficulty spike when unlocking Sheol/Cathedral, and especially the Chest. You will barely make it for the first 20 runs and die because you haven't unlocked the more powerful items yet, and a lot of times its just balanced around using cheesy items (especially Sacred Heart and Brimstone). After you unlock everything you will usually win a lot of runs.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

That point in every Need for Speed campaign where the enemy just starts rubber banding, I remember it being really bad in Underground 1.

I played it back in the day and quit at the race after you break up with your gf. I played it just a couple of years ago and got stuck in the exact same place.

This is because there is a key hidden down below the rising platform. With the way the camera was focused in the original, I imagine a lot of kids playing it didn't realize there was another path underneath that floating platform, leading to a lot of frustration, especially in an era without internet walkthroughs and Let's Plays. Heck, I remember getting stuck my first time.

I just played this temple (not for the first time) a couple of days ago so it's fresh in my mind. Funnily enough I actually did get stuck, but not at the central pillar thanks to the camera angle you mentioned. It was the key halfway up the pillar where you meet Ruto, behind a bombable wall.

As for my own, any part of RE2 where you play as Sherry. 90% of the time, I do it first time. Just every so often I get unlucky. The tank in MGS1 is the same way for me.

 

[Lurkerish Kandor]

Never played FO4 much but I heard there was an option that added typical survival needs meters and preventing fast travel, and while the game's pretty boring once you're like 10 hours deep, Survival at least would mean it wasn't totally braindead. Fallout 4's Survival Mode makes me wonder if it was playtested at all, and the jump from Very Hard to Survival feels like it's taking the piss.

On Survival, you can't check your Hunger/Thirst/Sleep. You have to guess at what your needs are at, and medications etc. don't tell you what they're going to negatively affect in-game, only in loading screen tips. Everything kills you in 1 or 2 hits except Bloatflies. Enemies randomly give you crippling disease debuffs that fuck you over, and you also get illnesses from sleeping in perfectly clean beds in towns. If you want to cure diseases and illness, you need proper Antibiotics - except no merchant in the game sells them, I never found ANY in any medical loot containers despite what the wiki says, and to manufacture them yourself you need to have a certain amount of INT and buy into a particular perk, as well as needing the requisite materials to make Antibiotics at a chemistry station.

It's basically impossible to go explore and gain levels and loot, because you're only allowed to save by sleeping in a bed (which will make you sick) so even if you manage to survive any combat encounter and get some loot, on your walk back to somewhere safe you might be spotted by a hostile NPC in a random encounter, and a single stray bullet could instantly kill you and undo the last 15-30 minutes of gameplay.

Then I started another character on "very hard" and sleep-walked through the game for a few hours till it got too boring to bother anymore. It might be doable if you go onto Survival with an already established character, but I don't see how you're meant to go start-to-finish on Survival without it being too tedious and bullshit to not be a waste of time.

I'm going back to STALKER: GAMMA. At least there the survival mechanics and campfire-only saving feel like someone playtests and balances the game.

 

[Evil Peter Griffin]

A couple have been... Also is NOE the fly low one? Ok dsp. Just fly low. If 10 year old me can figure out you can cheese it by flying over the flat ocean whats your excuse?

Just fly low on a PS2 where the trees pop in a few feet ahead of you.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

Imagine going to a Blockbuster and renting this game, or a FuncoLand and buying the game
In both situations, the instruction manual is NOT included
The internet wasn't a thing, and if it was, it was very early AOL with very shitty dial-up
You play through the game and get to Chapter 4
You tunnel through the inside of a mother fucking whale like you're fucking Jonah from the Bible
The whale finally spits you out, now it's time to go to Chapter 5
You see THIS FUCKING SCREEN
"wtf, nobody told me about a frequency input!"
"Did i miss an item somewhere?
"WAS IT IN THAT MOTHERFUCKING WHALE!?!?!"
Reset, go through every nook and cranny, find all available items everywhere
Still get this screen after the whale part.

if you know, you know, and I feel your pain.

 

[TheArtilleryman]

I've watched youtubers play this game called Terraria and apparently in that game the moment you kill the Wall of Flesh it unlocks "hardmode" and hardmode is the rest of the content that's been hidden, it's basically a bunch of new enemies, new biomes, new ores and new items and it looks like every enemy has not only as much health as the boss you just killed earlier, but they also do 10 times as much damage. For the first couple days it's literally unsurvivable until you get better armour and by that point the game starts feeling about the same as before because you can actually defend yourself.

That's a real spike in difficulty, I want to see more examples like this. No opinionated "this mission's hard wah wah!", "this boss is hard wah wah!" dogshit, I want something that's tangible and could fuck you real hard if you're not well prepared and you can't possibly be prepared against this bullshit

It's only a bad difficulty spike if, like many of those youtubers and probably most regular players, you look up the meta strategies on the wiki or YT and use them to beat the wall of flesh early before you're really ready for what comes after. Strats like finding the water bolt spell early and bouncing it between floor and ceiling of the underworld to max DPS, explosive rabbits, wired traps, minishark, things like that. If you get the high tier pre-hardmode equipment like the inferno armour and the nights edge sword or the queen bee themed weapons like the game clearly intends for you to do, hardmode isn't much of a dramatic increase thereafter (so long as you are careful of the newly spawned hallowed biome until you farm some of the hardmode metals). You should play it yourself and try it this way.

 

[Shart Attack]

Robotrek, an old and overlooked RPG for the SNES. The game is mostly easy except for the bosses, which are reasonably tough. There are no random encounters, you only fight enemies if you run into them on the map. There's a sequence about a third of the way through the game where you have to escape from the villains' volcano lair. There's a small room that appears empty at first, but it's actually filled with invisible enemies who are vastly out of your league at that point in the game. You'll run into one and get dragged into a turn-based battle. You'll attempt to attack it, deal no damage, and get one-shot instantly. You return later with infrared goggles and higher levels, but the first time you encounter them, they can and will slaughter you. After that room, it's right back to mostly easy gameplay.

 

[Green Kitbash]

Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden games were always fucked. Like 2 is all over the place but 1 was bizarre

So the 1st level is pretty hard right, it sets the tone. But the second fucking level the difficulty spikes way way up. But then the third level? Fuckin' easy. And the game remains easy until it spikes again with some BS enemy placement.

2 is like that but much more rapid, I could never find a groove in those games. Take DMC3, its hard yes but it properly escalates. And sure there are easy bits at times but it feels much more well designed as a challenge.

 

[Book Thief]

I'll never get over how people list superbosses and final bosses on this thread. The point of a final boss is that it tests your skills at the game and superbosses are fully optional.

I'll concede you may have a point when I brought up Merga. I only brought her up because I wanted to bring up something other than Touhou since I know not many people here play those games, as well as to prove that it's not my only pool of reference. It's just that it's such a huge jump up from the rest of the game that it feels so unfair, and I wanted to get it off my chest.

However, I will absolutely stand my ground when it comes to Clownpiece. Sagume is hard, but not too difficult when you've got her figured out, while the final boss, Junko, is also hard, but she mostly just spams circles at you. Clownpiece on the other hand forces you to micro-dodge UP into incoming fire in order to avoid being crushed by the bottom of the screen by lasers coming from the side of the screen that divide the screen into several horizontal chunks that move downwards, and you only get about half-a-second between each wave of lasers, so you better do it fast.

Here's a video for reference. Note that watching a player who has perfected the fight is not the same as playing it for yourself blind. I played it for myself blind. It was not a fun experience.

I've heard it said from other players that the Extra Stage -- an unlockable bonus stage that contains an extra challenging boss -- is actually easier than the main game. This may be intentional from a game-design stand-point, as the main game allows you the option of using "Point Device Mode," which is the "Infinite Lives with Checkpoints" system I mentioned earlier. But let that sink in: Clownpiece single-handedly inflates the difficulty of the main game so much that she dwarves what is supposed to be the game's ultimate challenge.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

any mission from Jak 2.

That "get the seal of Mar from the water slums" mission was fucking notorious and for good reason. Endless swarms of enemies dropping in to shoot you, nowhere to take cover, stuck between running the gauntlet of maze-like docks or trying to hoverboard out in the water and hope you don't catch a stray bullet. I think there's a cheese strategy or two to try, but goddamn was it harder than any part of Jak 1. And it isn't even the only mission to suddenly spike like that!

Oh, here's a good one. In XCOM 2 Collection, there are a number of bosses that wrecked my game out of the blue. They're ultra powerful and can slaughter your whole squad, no problem. They also recur throughout your game, and pop up randomly.

The trick to deal with them is to look for this DLC, turn it off, and have a great time reading all the negative reviews.
View attachment 5808101

The frostbomb is effectively mandatory for those bastards, along with some mimic beacons. WotC did nerf them/make them easier due to the adjustments on them showing up (I think they'll only first appear on blacksite missions, then have a chance to pop up in regular missions until you kill them,) and by making it so they don't get free reactions for soldiers out of sight or things like reloading. I agree on them being overtuned in vanilla. WotC really did the whole "nemesis aliens" system better besides.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Never played FO4 much but I heard there was an option that added typical survival needs meters and preventing fast travel, and while the game's pretty boring once you're like 10 hours deep, Survival at least would mean it wasn't totally braindead. Fallout 4's Survival Mode makes me wonder if it was playtested at all, and the jump from Very Hard to Survival feels like it's taking the piss.

It is impossible to make Fallout 4 a truly hard game. I don't care how high you set the difficulty to or if you're playing on the Survival difficulty or not, short of hardcore difficulty mods only way to make the game have a sharp difficulty turn is to go to any of the DLCs(Automatron/Far Harbor/Nuka World) at a very early level(Nuka World is the worst and it is available the earliest from starting location). Even then, once you level up a little and get the OP DLC gear, the game become really easy from there. There is no locations, set pieces or enemies I can think of that pose an actual challenge, it's all about levels and how bullet spongy they are. I think Bethesda gave up trying to balance their shit games, at several points in the early game where they don't want you snooping around they quite literally just put powered armored raiders with fat men(there are no enemies with a fat man in F3 or NV, your player is also given a suit of power armor of their own within like 15 minutes of the game)

If you want a glimpse of what Fallout 4 would look like if it was an actually difficult game, check out FROST. That mod is hard all the way thru however, so not as much of a difficulty curve as much as a rough assfucking all the way thru, only for sadists.

 

[Lurkerish Kandor]

your player is also given a suit of power armor of their own within like 15 minutes of the game

It can be even less: I was using an Alt-Start mod that essentially removes the story wholesale and lets you pick a location to go from, two of those options are inside and directly next to Concord, which means you could sprint your ass off and get the Power Armor in probably less than one minute even from the further away of the two options.

Also it depends on your definition of difficulty, but I wasn't joking when I said Survival Mode with no difficulty mods means everything kills you in 2 hits. That's just me being a bit pedantic though, because I also wouldn't consider that "Difficulty", I consider it bullshit, basically padding the game by like you said not balancing it and making it tedious as fuck.
Playing a DMC game on Heaven & Hell mode is difficult, but just making a game that already relies on grind to have any longevity even fucking longer by making everything unreasonable is just a fuck you to the audience.
Glad I haven't paid for any Bethesda game I've played since the OG 360 Release of Oblivion

 

[KingofSomething]

Didn't Marble Zone have some water elements in it too? Or is that another level I'm thinking of?

You're thinking of Labyrinth Zone if anything

That "get the seal of Mar from the water slums" mission was fucking notorious and for good reason. Endless swarms of enemies dropping in to shoot you, nowhere to take cover, stuck between running the gauntlet of maze-like docks or trying to hoverboard out in the water and hope you don't catch a stray bullet. I think there's a cheese strategy or two to try, but goddamn was it harder than any part of Jak 1. And it isn't even the only mission to suddenly spike like that!

I enjoyed that game, but it really could have benefited from some more generous checkpoints and a few more defensive options. Nothing like doing a long trek through the sewers just to die near the end and get sent back to the beginning. And yeah the water slums mission sucked ass. I think that's the longest one I was stuck on. Those fuckers don't need good aim when they drop enough of them to cover the area with bullets

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

Ecco the dolphin.

Just chilling in the bay with my homies then shit goes south, then it goes really south. Never made it beyond level 2.

 

[Baboeshka]

Thumper. When it introduces multiple tracks and forces you into segments where you need to be up in the air while performing perfect turns.
Elden Ring with Malekith and Malenia with their incredibly fast attack patterns.

 

[Calandrino]

I'll concede you may have a point when I brought up Merga. I only brought her up because I wanted to bring up something other than Touhou since I know not many people here play those games, as well as to prove that it's not my only pool of reference. It's just that it's such a huge jump up from the rest of the game that it feels so unfair, and I wanted to get it off my chest.

I think final bosses are fair game for the topic, unless the game has particularly tricky end credits. You expect the final boss to be the hardest thing in the game, but sometimes he's harder than the rest of the game combined.

Anyway, thread tax: the only level in Blast Corps I can remember the name of is "Diamond Sands". That ring any bells for anyone?

 

[30+GameOvers]

Also it depends on your definition of difficulty, but I wasn't joking when I said Survival Mode with no difficulty mods means everything kills you in 2 hits. That's just me being a bit pedantic though, because I also wouldn't consider that "Difficulty", I consider it bullshit, basically padding the game by like you said not balancing it and making it tedious as fuck.

One of the bigger issues people had with Fallout 4 at launch was how every enemy became a bullet sponge past a certain point, while others offered absolutely no challenge. You know, typical Bethesda fair.
Survival mode rebalanced everything: You die in 2 hits but so does pretty much everybody else. The game is much more balanced, and actually forces you to start paying attention to the game rather than mindlessly gunning everything down with no opposition. This doesn't make the game challenging, mind you, just have a modicum of challenge until you get used to it. The base game also might seem difficult when you encounter your first few powered armored raiders with fat men, until you learn how to avoid them or come back and hunt down them at higher levels, same logic applies here.

 

[Shroom King]

if you played season mode on tecmo super bowl for the NES the computer opponent went from dogshit to almost impossible to beat if you went undefeated thru the first 15 games. i'd be routinely winning games 77-0 only to get to the final regular season game undefeated and all of a sudden the computer becomes unstoppable; they'd score on every possession and the only way i could ever win that final game is to get lucky with timing such that i scored a TD every possession including the final one before halftime to go up by 7. if your record going into that last game was even slightly worse (14-1 or 13-2) it'd be an easy win

15-1? I usually get my first loss by week 6 or 7 because the computer starts cheating way too much, and that is with me pulling nonsense like going to my opponent's roster before a game and swapping out the starters with the backups and changing the playbooks to have slow to develop plays like flea flickers and reverses.

Go-Go! Nekketsu Hockey Club: Slip-and-Slide Madness (it is the same characters from Super Dodge Ball and River City Ransom but they play ice hockey) has a really nasty difficulty spike. The first match you will win 18-1 on your first try. The second match you will get your head ripped off and shoved up your ass. And the game only gets harder from there. I gave up entirely on the game at the sixth match (the one with the landmines).

 

[Calandrino]

Streets of Rage 2 - Stage 5 boss R.Bear. Cheap, massive and the fastest obese man in video game history. Can also randomly body-splash you ass-first from anywhere on the screen. Every other boss in the game can be beaten with skill - including Shiva and Mr. X - but this twat requires cheesing tactics almost exclusively

The real spike, at least on higher difficulties, is the elevator in (I think) stage 7. Cheesing isn't much help there. That part alone makes me think that Mania difficulty is something they threw in for a laugh without testing it.

Typical EKSHPURT player footage, timestamped appropriately:

Bro has been playing for over an hour without losing a life, then dies like 5 times within 4 minutes.