History ThatOneLevel / DarkSouls

* The Frigid Outskirts, better known by its nickname [[FanNickname Horsefuck Valley]]. A long run through a blizzard that obscures your vision even worse than in ''VideoGame/SilentHill'', where you'll constantly get rammed from all directions from the horselike Reindeer that will hit you before you can see them and take off a bunch of health. If you can somehow survive this chain of bullshit, you then have to cross a narrow bridge while fighting a lance wielding NPC who can very easily knock you off. Get through this and your reward is one of the most difficult boss battles in the game against Lud and Zallen, the King's Pets. Best part? Absolutely no bonfires the entire way through.

* No-Man's Wharf is great fun, if being constantly swarmed to death in the dark by more zombie Vikings than you meet in every dungeon in ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'' sounds like fun. The layout is convoluted and inconvenient, the entire place is dark unless you have a Pharros Lockstone, of which there are very few in the early game (complete with insta-drown pits right next to the path), and the two main enemies you fight are both irritating: Varangians are fast-moving, high-damage undead Vikings with annoying attack combos who are fond of ganging up on your or engaging you in tight confines, and the ape-like Darkdwellers take a fair amount of killing and can inflict bleed with their attacks, which, while highly telegraphed, also have a long reach. On the bright side, you do get to meet an NPC who will actually buy your ShopFodder! He'll relocate after, and you need to fight your way past seven Darkdwellers in a row to get to him.

* The Catacombs. For starters, it's packed with skeletons that will endlessly reassemble themselves until you find and kill the enemy that's resurrecting them. Even when you take care of all that, it's still full of frustrating enemies, pitfalls, and Skeleton Wheels, which are some of the most dangerous enemies in the game. Thankfully, this place is nowhere near as dangerous on NG+, which is why many players immediately go here after arriving at Firelink Shrine just to kill Pinwheel and obtain the Rite of Kindling.

* The Frigid Outskirts, better known by its nickname [[FanNickname Horsefuck Valley]]. A long run through a blizzard that obscures your vision even worse than in [[VideoGame/SilentHill]], where you'll constantly get rammed from all directions from the horselike Reindeer that will hit you before you can see them and take off a bunch of health. If you can somehow survive this chain of bullshit, you then have to cross a narrow bridge while fighting a lance wielding NPC who can very easily knock you off. Get through this and your reward is one of the most difficult boss battles in the game against Lud and Zallen, the King's Pets. Best part? Absolutely no bonfires the entire way through.

* New Londo Ruins can be very annoying. For one thing, there are ''no'' bonfires in it anywhere, so if you die, you're going to have to do some trekking to get back to it. For another, most of the enemies are ghosts and are completely invulnerable (and unblockable) unless you are either using a cursed weapon (extremely rare), or are currently cursed yourself (which halves your HP). The only way to reliably progress is to use a Transient Curse, an item that temporarily curses you with no downsides, but it tends to wear off with no warning in the middle of a pack of ghosts. And the lower area is filled with Darkwraiths, powerful swordsmen who are capable of draining your humanity away from you.

** However, if you started with the Master Key, you can take a shortcut by heading to the entrance to New Londo Ruins (accessible from Firelink Shrine) then open the door to the Valley of Drakes, at which point you can cross the bridge and enter a cave leading to Blighttown, allowing a player to [[SequenceBreaking skip over]] the Lower Undead Burg ''and'' the Depths, thus making the task of traversing the Lower Undead Burg optional. You will, however, have to face some blighted ogres along the way, so be careful!

** However, if you started with the Master Key, you can take a shortcut by heading to the entrance to New Londo Ruins (accessible from Firelink Shrine) then opening the door to the Valley of Drakes, at which point you can cross the bridge and enter a cave leading to Blighttown, allowing a player to [[SequenceBreaking skip over]] the Lower Undead Burg ''and'' the Depths, thus making the task of traversing the Lower Undead Burg optional. You will, however, have to face some blighted ogres along the way, so be careful!

* The Catacombs of Carthus, which can best be described as the bastardized, unholy offspring of The Catacombs and Sen's Fortress from ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsI''. Lousy with traps, filled with tight corridors that will absolutely ruin any horizontal attacks and make dodging/camera work extremely difficult, and also home of the [[DemonicSpiders Skeleton Swordsmen]], absolutely nightmarish {{Lightning Bruiser}}s capable of ''teleport rolling'' a la the Old Hunter Bone quickstep from ''VideoGame/{{Bloodborne}}''. Oh and one more thing, just to add a cherry on top of the evil cake: [[spoiler:the '''Bonewheel Skeletons''' are back!]]
* The Cathedral of the Deep is where the proverbial gloves come off. The place is absolutely stonking ''massive'' and incredibly complex to navigate, forcing the player in and out and through all manner of different pathways and routes. The place is also filled with traps and powerful enemies, and has just about every negative area feature in the series stacked onto one place- it's dark, it's filled with poison that slows you, and it tosses gank squads at you like nobodies business. While running Pyromancy can alleviate this, as many enemies inside the Cathedral are weak to fire and the cramped corridors make it easy to lob Fire Orbs downrange, it's still a massive pain in the ass.

* New Londo Ruins can be very annoying. For one thing, there are ''no'' bonfires in it anywhere, so if you die, you're going to have to do some trekking to get back to it. For another, most of the enemies are ghosts and are completely invulnerable (and unblockable) unless you are either using a cursed weapon (extremely rare), or are currently cursed yourself (which halves your HP). The only way to reliably progress is to use a Transient Curse, an item that temporarily curses you with no downsides, but it tends to wear off with no warning in the middle of a pack of ghosts. And the lower area is filled with Darkwraiths, powerful swordsmen who are capable of draining your humanity away from you.
* While the difficulty can be mitigated by ranged classes, Sen's Fortress is one of the most frustrating parts of the game and a massive wake-up call to players who get too comfortable. The Snake Men are DemonicSpiders who will outrange most melee characters, drain your stamina like crazy, and can jump halfway across a room to reach you. Some of them shoot lightning at you from ledges you can't reach while you fight the melee ones, and the very narrow ledges and corridors mean you rarely get to circle around behind them and have to fight them head-on. Some Snake Men will even meet you on the ledges to kill you, and their lightning bolts will knock you into the pendulums that can throw you to the lower levels, at which point you either take the nearby staircase or die, again. Not to mention all the swinging pendulums you have to dodge while fighting, a few hard to spot arrow traps, and the first appearance of a mimic chest which if you don't know how to spot ''will'' instantly kill you without warning. Oh, and if you fall off a ledge you're dropped into a tar-filled pit swarming with Titanite Demons, although they don't respawn if you manage to kill them. And that's ''only'' if you fall off a lower ledge. If you go up a narrow ledge anywhere above the first floor and be careless about how you are approaching the swinging pendulums (which seem to narrow the distance between them every subsequent floor), be ready to trek through the fortress ''again''. And as the only bonfire in Sen's Fortress is rather hard to reach (it is accessible if you have already gone through the interior of the fortress and you have to know [[GuideDangIt where to look]]), a slight mis-step is extremely frustrating even in the 'safe' upper levels, with even more narrower ledges.

* Lower Undead Burg is very short, but you'll quickly grow to hate every second that you're there. The only enemies are DemonicSpiders, and at the very end is ThatOneBoss the Capra Demon. What makes it especially frustrating is that unlike most other runs to aggravating bosses, you can't just run past everyone and ''have'' to stop and kill everything in front of you to avoid getting surrounded and killed, driving the time between refights ''way'' up.

* The Catacombs. For starters, it's packed with skeletons that will endlessly reassemble themselves until you find and kill the enemy that's resurrecting them. Even when you take care of all that, it's still full of frustrating enemies, pitfalls, and Skeleton Wheels, which are some of the most dangerous enemies in the game.

* No-Man's Wharf is great fun, if being constantly swarmed to death in the dark by more zombie Vikings than you meet in every dungeon in ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'' sounds like fun. The layout is convoluted and inconvenient, the entire place is dark unless you have a Pharros Lockstone, of which there are very few in the early game (complete with insta-drown pits right next to the path), and the two main enemies you fight are both irritating: Varangians are fast-moving, high-damage undead Vikings with annoying attack combos who are fond of ganging up on your or engaging you in tight confines, and the ape-like Darkdwellers take a fair amount of killing and can inflict bleed with their attacks, which, while highly telegraphed, also have a long reach. On the bright side, you do get to meet an NPC who will actually buy your VendorTrash! ...Once, before he relocates. And you need to fight your way past seven Darkdwellers in a row to get to him.

* The Shrine of Amana is generally considered one of the hardest, if not the hardest, areas of the game, especially if you're a melee user. It's very large and dark, water covers the entire floor, which hides that the floor has plenty of bottomless pits, and also causes the enemies to aggro more quickly. Speaking of the enemies, they are also quite nasty. Arch Drakes, which move very quickly and can easily swarm you, and worse, priestesses that can fire ''homing'' magic missiles, which were thankfully later nerfed to lose the "homing on" aspect. Also, they usually aggro at the same time as the Arch Drakes.

* Another painful area would be the Iron Keep. Powerful mobs that will require you to take them on one at a time, archers that can aim from far away to mess with your balance and push you off the edge and into a pool of lava, and health-consuming fiery contraptions that can only be deactivated near the end of the dungeon. If you don't know your way around the area, you might as well fight [[ThatOneBoss the Smelter Demon]]. By comparison, [[BreatherBoss the boss at the end of the Iron Keep is a joke]].

* Blighttown is pretty much the point where players either become masters or give up. Enemies with attacks that go through your block (either poison or grab attacks), snipers that silently inflict Toxic on you without so much as a hit flinch (so you might not realize what's making you Toxic), clustered enemies that quickly swarm you, and a narrow maze of walkways without EdgeGravity (to make dodging suicidal). There's also some FakeDifficulty involved, most notably the fact that the size of the level tends to cause massive slowdown on the console versions. The only small consolation is that ArtificialStupidity seems to kick in strong here, as the enemies' pathfinding AI seems to have trouble with the walkways and will constantly hurl themselves to their deaths.

* While the difficulty can be mitigated by ranged classes, Sen's Fortress is one of the most frustrating parts of the game and a massive wake-up call to players who get too comfortable. The Snake Men are DemonicSpiders who will outrange most melee characters, drain your stamina like crazy, and can jump halfway across a room to reach you. Some of them shoot lightning at you from ledges you can't reach while you fight the melee ones, and the very narrow ledges and corridors mean you rarely get to circle around behind them and have to fight them head-on. Not to mention all the swinging pendulums you have to dodge while fighting, a few hard to spot arrow traps, and the first appearance of a mimic chest which if you don't know how to spot ''will'' instantly kill you without warning. Oh, and if you fall off a ledge you're dropped into a tar-filled pit swarming with Titanite Demons, although they don't respawn if you manage to kill them.

* Lost Izaleth is rightly infamous as the worst level in the game. It ''starts'' with many players being unable to see how to get in because of the way the bright lava affects visibility in the Centipede Demon's boss room. From there, the player must traverse a big lake of lava, which continues to negatively affect visibility, which they need to spend a ring slot to cross without burning to death (and even then, still stings and constantly drains their health), and which is absolutely infested with big crowds of deadly "Leaping Demons" that are actually just the bottom half of the zombie dragon repeatedly copy-pasted everywhere, and which can do a lot of damage on top of the damage they'll already be taking. The mid-level bonfire is hidden behind an invisible wall partway too. Once the lava is traversed, there's a relatively linear selection of corridors, culminating in having to fight an enemy pyromancer outside the boss room, possibly while also being invaded by Kirk. Oh, and you can accidentally ruin Siegmeyer's quest here, and the boss is considered a disappointment, if not the worst in the series. A shortcut that circumvents the lava portions of the level if you've gotten high enough in the Chaos Servant covenant mitigates some of these issues, but if the best thing you can say about a level is that you can skip most of it...

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Dark Souls 1]]

* All of the areas related to the Bell Keeper and Rat King covenants. While each of them is rather short and can be fully explored rather quickly, you are highly likely to get invaded, which depending on the opposing player's skill can make getting through these locations a huge pain. If it's one of the Belfrys, the entrance will be blocked, so you'll have to either beat the invader or make it to the end, which you might not be able to find quickly if it's your first time exploring. If you take too long here, you might even be invaded by a second player. The Rat King areas, on the other hand, reverse the roles and allow members of Rat King covenant to pull you into their world, where not only them, but all AI enemies will be able to attack you together, and they can activate traps that poison you and degrade your armor, among other things. This is especially bad in Doors of Pharros, where you will always spawn in knee-deep water with two enemies immediately headed for you, with some more enemies throwing axes at you from a higher floor with no fast access. While dying in the Rat King areas doesn't cost you anything, beating the odds and winning doesn't really get you much good either, and considering the frequency of these events they'll start to get annoying fairly quickly.