Roguelikes. Their defining feature is having one life which, when lost, also deletes your save. Combining this with (seemingly) Everything Trying to Kill You and (often) dying repeatedly whilst learning how to survive in the gameworld ("Medusa - causes petrification. Sadly, so does eating her corpse") is part of the attraction.
So, Nintendo Hard and roguelikes are somewhat synonymous - simply being a roguelike will qualify most games for this trope by default.
- Is NetHack too easy for you? Then it's time to play ADOM. Yup, it's a roguelike with a world map. Which means that there are multiple randomly-generated death trap dungeons for you to perish in. It's not uncommon for gamers to play a month or two before even getting to the main dungeon. And unlike NetHack, it only gets harder as you play. (If it takes a year before the average first win in NetHack, it takes about 5 years for ADOM. And let's not even mention the ultra endings...)
- The Binding of Isaac is a roguelike twin-stick shooter with Zelda-esque dungeon exploration elements. While there's just enough Game Breaking pick-ups and combinations to keep it from going too far down this route, the game is still extremely tough if you don't manage to get one of them, with endgame bosses veering into straight-up Bullet Hell territory, and the rest of the game is infested with Goddamn Bats and Demonic Spiders. Rebirth, while offering up more item synergies, allowing even formerly useless power-ups the chance to be part of a powerful item combination, also fixes the vanilla game's rather merciful slow-down issues and caps your HP at 12 hearts (where before there was no cap at all, at least for soul hearts, allowing you to hoard so many soul hearts the HUD couldn't keep track of them all.)
- Dead Cells is an incredibly punishing game where tanking hits is just not an option. Once you get past the normal difficulty, enemy damage skyrockets and they can take a massive chunk of your life bar in a single hit. You can only drink out of your healing flask a limited number of times, and you get less and less charges the higher the difficulty. You have an extremely short Mercy Invincibility and there are traps and pits to watch out for. You get a bit of reprieve via upgrades, but they take a long amount of grind to max out. If you want to get to that True Final Boss gated behind the highest difficulty, better learn how to dodge, parry, and kill everything.
- Dungeon Crawl is known for being a roguelike that tries to play fair — there are very few 'trap items', the interface is designed to be simple and easy to use, examining an enemy will give you a rough description of their abilities and a rudimentary 'threat level' assessment, there's no item destruction, and the game lacks the absurd Combinatorial Explosion that most other roguelikes possess. That being said, it also gets rid of a lot of tricks that most roguelikes have to trivialize the game. There are no healing spells, and your strongest healing potion will heal maybe 30 HP. There is no amulet of life saving, and the closest thing you get to wishing is the scroll of acquirement, which is largely random. Resources are heavily limited, including potions, scrolls, wand charges, and even experience. Level Grinding doesn't work; if you hang out on a level too long, the spawn rate dials down to nothing and the game starts throwing disproportionately strong monsters at you. In short, the game is rooting for you, but it's still going to kill you — and then your ghost will kill you again.
- Dwarf Fortress, where the main question is not "will your fortress collapse?" but "when and how will your fortress collapse?"
- The question may also be "How do you feel like destroying this fortress?".
- And that's if you get past the learning stage. Being hard to master is one thing; even getting to "apprentice" level in here is horribly difficult even if you spend the entire time with the DF wiki page open. And even if you've mastered the game, the Self-Imposed Challenge potential is enormous.
- This is turned up to eleven by the "Dig Deeper" mod, which introduces orcs: trap-proof, door-unlocking fiends that turn up in huge numbers before the end of the first in-game year. (It's possible to end up outnumbered 7:1 by Orc mobs appearing before you've even got your first immigration wave, complete with Orc spearmasters, archers and mace lords). Not like this is the only mod to do this; it speaks volumes about the community that just about every popular mod makes the game significantly harder.
- The best way to play Dwarf Fortress is to train yourself to ditch the idea that losing is a bad thing. After all, one of the game's slogans is "Losing is Fun!"
- FTL: Faster Than Light? More like FTL: For The Lose. It is, in short, Star Trek: The Rogue Like. Even on easy it's still extremely difficult, with luck playing a heavy role. Run into a ship you're not well prepared to face? At best, you can expect to take hefty damage before you can escape. At worst, it's possible to die in the first sector. And every run ends in a final, three-stage confrontation with the Rebel flagship; even for a Final Boss it's an increase in difficulty over anything else the game could have already conceivably thrown at you.
- Hades is stupidly difficult. The main objective is the reach the surface by fighting through dozens of Underworld chambers across the realms of Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and finally the Temple of Styx. When do finally make it to the surface, you'll soon die anyway for story reasons and respawn back at the House of Hades. And just so the player doesn't get too comfortable, each realm features enemies more difficult than the last. You have to escape the Underworld multiple times to finally make the credits roll.
- The worst Roguelike of all is probably Iter Vehemens Ad Necem (usually called IVAN). Its name translates from Latin as "A Violent Road To Death." It's intended to be effectively Unwinnable, although some players have managed to win anyway. This is a bug and will be fixed in the next release.
- Part of the difficulty in NetHack is caused by the sheer randomness of the game with limited efforts to balance. There was one player who died without ever taking a turn — all because the game generated a random monster in line of sight of them at the start of the game, then randomly generated a wand in the possession of the monster, and randomly selected that wand to be a wand of death.
- Slash'EM is another variant that takes NetHack and ups the ante. "NetHack doesn't care if you live or die. Slash'EM wants you dead."
- It's also possible to have Grayswandir (a lawfully aligned artifact sword) generated on the stairs you start the game on. Combine automatically picking up items (the default setting) and it zapping non-lawfuls who pick it up, and it's possible to die before you get a single turn. It's also one of the rarest and most powerful weapons in the game, making it even more frustrating, since now you're dead and won't get to use it.
- The Mysterious Dungeon series in all but a handful of its iterations — Shiren the Wanderer, Torneko: The Last Hope, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, Chocobo's Dungeon, and quite a few others — exemplify this entire trope to the max. The entire game is based on the premise of Roguelike dungeon exploration, with many of the same specifications, in particular that the hero has but one life. The catch: you also can't save levels, gear, items, power-ups, nothing. If you should happen to die (and you will), you are forced to restart at a checkpoint with nothing but your fists and a moderately powerful healing item and Level 1 experience, usually with a dozen hit points. A single mistake can lead to rapid death, the dungeons are randomized and often "themed" (e.g. nothing but Scrolls, traps everywhere, constant damage due to heat), you must stay fed or the hero will die and quickly, monsters spawn infinitely, traps are hidden in the worst places, and the worst of it? When you finish a dungeon, you revert to Level 1 again, and in some installments give up all your equipment, essentially starting from scratch. Some give you a leg up, like allowing you to take a few items in or store things so they don't get lost when you die, but not much else. The only exception to the rule is Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, which isn't necessarily a bad thing given it's a game marketed to kids... but as it's covered below, the post-games tend to more than make up for it.
- The worst of the lot is the second Mystery Dungeon game, the first Shiren The Wanderer on the Super Famicom. It had one checkpoint: a hut at the very beginning of the game. If you died at any point, you went all the way back there, and needed to slog through all the dungeons again to get back where you were, minus any XP or items. It's brain-breakingly difficult and often quite unfair.
- If you poke around Ustream you can often find Japanese players playing Jokenji Asuka Kenzan, a sequel to Shiren, only much more difficult. It's not uncommon to see it modified to insane levels, like "no weapons" or "1 HP per level".
- As mentioned above, the postgame of each Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game. After you finish the story mode, some of the Bonus Dungeons that you can unlock are sadistic. Examples include: Western Cave and Silver Trench in Red and Blue Rescue team, two dungeons that have 99 floors, keep ruining your items with traps, and have strong Pokémon. To take it up a notch, there are 99 floor dungeons that lower your level to level 1 (Wish Cave and Joyous Tower in PMD1). To make it even harder, there are 99 floor dungeons that lower your level to level 1, do not let you bring any money or items, and do not let you bring in any team members, essentially putting you in the mercy of the random number generator (Purity Forest in PMD1, Zero Isle West, and Zero Isle South in PMD2). Explorers of Sky essentially just decided to make the hardest dungeon possible by making it 99 floors, lower your level to level 1, does not allow you to bring in any items or money, prevents you from bringing any team members, and keeps traps hidden after you trigger them. Explorers of Sky adds a new infair trap that warps and gives all wild Pokémon on the floor the "Grudge" status, which results in all power points of the last move used being drained away if you kill them.
- The sequel, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness also has Zero Island, which is broken into four sections (North, East, South, and West)spanning over 50 floors each and a different ruleset for each one. Depending on the section you attempt, you won't get any EXP from fallen monsters, your inventory gets completely or partially wiped of items, and/or the level of all members of your squad is temporarily set back to 1. Oh, and you can't call for a rescue upon being defeated. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky adds Zero Island Center, which is filed with monsters around levels 90-99.
- Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon goes Nintendo Hard far earlier on. Dramatically slowed leveling, the removal of checkpoint saves, an inability to grind in much of the game due to limited missions/story segments, and the fact that hold items have been ditched for the RNG emera system would have made it hard enough, but that enemies can now EVOLVE if they defeat your party members is just brutal. Combine that with the fact that appropriate level enemies can reliably 3-shot your team, and this is a recipe for disaster. And God help you if they happen to pick up a looplet with the Awakening emera on it...
- Keep in mind, even with those challenges (and the fact that in those games, Continuing is Painful), the above-mentioned Shiren the Wanderer series (from the developers of the games above, mind you) makes these look like child's play in comparison. Mainly because dying saps all your levels as well as your items. Have fun.
- Spelunky is an addictive platformer/roguelike hybrid in which you will die many, MANY times due to frogs, spikes, yetis, and everything in between. The fact you can make shortcuts to later parts of the game doesn't make the game any easier, only more plausible to actually beat.
- The shortcuts actually make the game significantly harder. Since you then have fewer floors to get the items necessary to make winning the game plausible. The shortcuts also preclude you from entering the bonus dungeon.
- 20XX is a roguelike platformer styled after the Mega Man X series, and while the early game can be a cakewalk if you're used to the MMX series, even the most broken power-ups can't save you from the sheer Platform Hell that the game eventually turns into once it takes off the kid's gloves.
