Best Games With High Difficulty Curves

Difficulty balancing is a supremely subjective topic, with different players finding challenges in all manners of gameplay mechanics and systems. What some players may find difficult, others may find trivial.

Related

The 20 Hardest Video Games of All Time

It doesn't matter if you scream and yell, throw your controller or go crying to your mommy, there's no beating these 20 games unless you actually learn to get good.

Posts

Soulslikes such as Dark Souls soon become extremely difficult for newcomers to the genre and feature plenty of difficulty spikes throughout, requiring players to have quick reactions and well-timed dodges or deflections if they want to stay alive. On the other hand, strategy games such as XCOM 2 don't require quick reaction speeds, but they do demand well-thought-out strategy, as the difficulty will soon crank up to the point that even the slightest mistake is punished.

6 Cuphead

An Easy-To-Learn Game With Distinctly Challenging Boss Fights

This colorful run-and-gun platformer is known for its beautiful art style and variety of distinctly challenging bosses. What starts as a fun action-platformer quickly spirals into a variety of challenging bosses that require constant attention.

Related

10 Video Games With Truly Unique Art Styles

Creative art styles bring a unique twist, and these are some of the best, most unique art styles in video games.

Posts

By  Kristy Ambrose

Thankfully, Cuphead never reaches impossible territory, and the game's wonderfully realized, cartoon aesthetic makes continuing in the face of adversity a little easier. Despite Cuphead's high difficulty curve, however, it remains a game that's easy to learn. As a result, Cuphead is more accessible than most other games with high levels of difficulty.

5 Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy

An Unforgiving Experience That Never Holds The Player's Hand

Getting Over It certainly won't be for everyone, as is the case for many so-called rage games, but it's a tremendously rewarding experience for those who manage to climb its horrendous difficulty curve. Getting Over It gives players the simple task of scaling a dastardly-designed mountain of trash from inside a cauldron, with naught but a hammer. What makes Getting Over It so infamous is its lack of manual saves and the variety of intentionally-designed places to go tumbling back to the start of the game.

This creates an incredibly steep difficulty curve, requiring players to truly master the movement controls of their character in order to progress. However, as players progress up the mountain, the game introduces mischievous new obstacles that require the player to figure out new techniques. This results in a difficulty curve that never stops climbing, just like the player needs to if they want to succeed.

4 XCOM 2

A Tactical Experience That Starts To Punish Every Mistake

XCOM as a series is known for high difficulty curves and challenging, tactical combat that rewards strategy and punishes blunders with reckless abandon. As a result, many players often bounce off of XCOM, especially as it begins to reveal how unforgiving it truly is. XCOM 2 may not begin as a particularly difficult game, but as with XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the difficulty can ramp up quickly.

The main factor of XCOM 2's high difficulty curve is how it's structured; as enemies begin to scale and missions get more difficult, players are expected to keep the pace with upgrades and levels, which comes naturally with success. As a result, players who fail a lot early or make poor decisions in the early-to-mid game will likely experience a steep difficulty curve. This, however, is part of the XCOM experience, and learning its many systems over repeated campaigns is part of the fun.

3 Dark Souls

A Twisted Difficulty Curve That's Different For Everyone

This first game in the iconic Dark Souls series is notorious for its steep difficulty curve. However, this difficulty can depend on all manner of variables; a player's starting items, chosen build, and path through the game can have a dramatic impact on their experience. Regardless of what build players choose, most will find that the game's difficulty is initially modest in the Undead Asylum but starts rapidly rising the moment they leave, especially if they head down to Blightown straight away.

Related

Dark Souls: Every Class Ranked From Worst To Best

A complete breakdown of every class in the original Dark Souls.

Posts

Bosses like Ornstein and Smough, Gwyn, and Artorias have been known to give players a tough time. Bosses aren't the only threat to players, though, with many enemies making even simple exploration a challenge.

2 Kerbal Space Program

A Knowledge-Based Difficulty Curve

This sandbox space simulation game features deeply simulated physics and gameplay that centers around constructing rockets and launching successful missions in outer space. Though the game's iconic mascots, the Kerbals, are far from reality, the game's mechanics are rooted in it. This results in a game that provides a steep learning curve that only gets steeper as players attempt more daring missions.

Unlike many games with high difficulty curves, Kerbal Space Program's difficulty is centered around player knowledge or lack thereof. As such, Kerbal Space Program is extremely rewarding to learn, as once players have managed to surpass the first hurdle of simply getting a rocket out into space, the possibilities are various.

1 Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

A Soulslike That Emphasizes Mastery And Skill

Developed by FromSoftware, the same studio behind the notoriously difficult Dark Souls series, Sekiro provides an experience that focuses on mastery. In the game, players are given just one weapon, immediately replacing the multitude of builds and RPG systems that Dark Souls is known for with pure, skill-based combat.

Sekiro is by no means a cakewalk at the start of the game, and yet it keeps cranking up the challenge throughout. Many of the later bosses in the game are extremely tough to beat and force players to practice and perfect their skills. The final boss of the main ending is notoriously difficult but also tremendously rewarding, as defeating them requires the player to have mastered the combat mechanics.