That One Level / Action-Adventure

Levels from action-adventure games that test your reflexes...and your patience.

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Games and series with their own pages

• The Legend of Zelda

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Other games:

Castlevania

The Castlevania games are notoriously hard, and have a number of these moments.

• ANY Clock Tower level in any Castlevania game. Moving platforms, conveyor belts, Medusa Heads, wall-to-floor-to-ceiling spikes, and to top it all off, a boss battle with Death in most recent games. Fun stuff.
  • In Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, the developers somehow decided that the first game was too easy, so Dracula's clock tower becomes even more insanely frustrating, with what seems to be a get-together of all the most annoying enemies in the game, coupled with a bunch of bottomless pits and disintegrating floors. Oh, and just because the developers are insane, once you get to Dracula and die, you don't respawn outside his chamber like in the other games. Nope, back to the beginning of the level for you!
  • The Clockwork Tower in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is easily the worst designed level in the game. The game's platforming is already finicky, so requiring the player to make precise jumps across moving platforms should NOT have been something that was in the game. This is topped off with several Guide Dang It! moments (such as needing to use a platforming manoeuvre that the game never tells you about), a difficult and out of nowhere boss and a boring looking colour palette. It's also a Marathon Level.
• Castlevania:
  • The entirety of Level 4; the catacombs and the outer area immediately following them. The catacombs are filled with Goddamned Bats and Mermen ready to knock you off of any platform you try to get on, made worse by the fact that they appear erratically while you're doing precision jumping on moving platforms over a pit of instant death water. If you survive that, you face the field of a million zillion Fleamen. Basically, it's a long path, with hawks constantly airdropping flea-men (the hardest to hit, fastest, and probably most downright annoying enemies in the game). If you let too many get in, you're screwed. If you let them surround you, you're screwed. If you take more than a few hits, you're screwed, because in order to reach the next checkpoint, you have to kill a White Dragon. This bugger slides up and down and erratically shoots fireballs out at you. Touching him or getting hit by a fireball will knock out 4 HP, so 4 hits and you're dead. After that, to reach the boss, you have to kill 2 more White Dragons, each placed in more annoying positions than the last. And then you have to kill Frankenstein's Monster and Igor. Note that Frankenstein and Igor also take out 4 hp on a hit, and if you die to them, you have to fight the last 2 White Dragons again before facing Frankenstein once more.
  • Just before you face off against Death in Stage 5, you come across a hallway containing two Axe Armors, both of whom take nine hits and throw axes at two different altitudes, while you can only get hit four times, provided you didn't get hit throughout the rest of the level. Axe Armors are easy enough to deal with, but then the infamous Medusa Heads ambush you from behind while you're doing so, and since Simon Belmont isn't the most agile guy in the universe, you're screwed.
  • Stage 16 (the third-to-last stage and the first section of the last area) has you crossing a stone bridge with gaps and Goddamned Giant Bats that take as many hits as the original Giant Bat from Stage 3 to kill. Did I mention this is only the third-to-last stage? The next stage has Goddamned Fleamen, and the final stage is the battle with Dracula the Goddamned Bathead. And since this is the last stage, you lose 4 out of 16 HP per hit, which means you die in just four hits.
• Levels 6 and 9^note the third stage of Dracula's castle of Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. Good luck beating those two without the “HELPME” code. Level 6 begins with an Axe Armor that you are forced to fight at short range (which is a lot harder than you think) followed by a stretch of conveyor-like rapids where you have crows, hidden Fishmen and Bottomless Pits to deal with, and ends with a collapsing bridge with crows flying randomly over it, followed by the Water Dragon. Level 9 starts with a Fleaman spam that surrounds you with up to five of them at a time, a stairwell sequence where you are simultaneously attacked by Skull Towers and Skeleton Flyers, and an even more difficult, two-story reprise of the rapids sequence from level 6. It ends with a rotary bridge where you are being chased by Medusa Heads (and just like the collapsing one, one hit is death, and this time you can't even jump), followed by the Doppelganger.
  • Block 7-5 on the Alucard route. You have to dodge falling blocks while at the same time wait for them to stack up to the appropriate height to reach the stairs to the next screen, and there are two difficult stretches to traverse before reaching the next checkpoint, including one spot where two crows dive bomb you from both directions. If you die before reaching the next Checkpoint, you have to go through the falling blocks all over again, and since you start with only 5 hearts, Alucard's bat ability won't help you very much. Hence why most of the time you'll likely take Sypha's path.
• Super Castlevania IV has level 8. The hardest level in the game by anyone's standards, full of instant death traps and, near the end, a random spike trap that will kill you unless you're lucky enough. If you make it through the level, though, the boss is a joke.
• In Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles, the PSP remake of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, the previously unremarkable Stage 5' has been turned into hell. It's easily the most ridiculously frustrating part of the game, and even if you manage to get to the end, you then have to fight against the Hydra. By this point, you'll probably be down to your last life, and the fight is so confusing that you'll probably waste it pretty quickly. At first, it's fairly straightforward; the boss' head shoots things or tries to eat you, depending on your position, so you dodge everything and whip him in the face. But then things get weird when its head seemingly deactivates and the game gives you no indication of what to do next. You're actually supposed to climb up the thing's back to find its other heads, which have their own attack patterns, and switch back and forth throughout the level. Without a walkthrough, this battle is almost impossible to beat just because the stage preceding it is so ridiculously hard that you almost never get to try twice in a row.
• Symphony Of The Nights Black Marble Gallery can be a pain, due to being full of Nova Skeletons and spike traps. It also has Guardians, as well as numerous other annoying enemies.
• Castlevania 64 is a chore to play through even at the best of times, thanks to sluggish movements and unhelpful camera angles. The most glaring instance of this is the level in which you have to carry an exploding gunpowder keg. One, you can't jump, or it'll blow up, instantly killing you. Two, you can't get hit without an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. Third, you can't put it down. The path naturally goes along ledges, filled with (what else) Ledge Bats and their cousins.
  • Another contender for the title of That One Level is the original version of Duel Tower, which they forgot to put save points in.
• The underground waterway in Circle of the Moon is utterly infested with Demonic Spiders, most notably the Ice Armors. These things throw two spears at you, both of which freeze you. If you're hit with the first, say hello to the second one for three times the damage, which is typically more than half your life bar gone right there. But those are just the starting point: we also have Sirens and Frozen Shades throwing projectiles at you from the air. The former moves erratically and is extremely difficult to dodge, while the latter has an odd delay on its projectiles that means they can hit you even after you kill them... and they freeze you too. On top of that, the place is filled with puzzles involving platforms you have to manipulate, which in themselves aren't so bad, except that item drops will always fall right through them, including extremely valuable DSS cards.
• While not as interminable as the Clockwork Tower in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, the Balcony from the previous chapter of that game merits mention. What's more fun than fighting waves of Demonic Spiders and Goddamned Bats with only sparse checkpoints? How about doing so in a series of enclosed spaces with camera angles designed to screw the player by making it difficult for them to even see what's going on?

#-L

• 3D Dot Game Heroes:
  • The game has that one level in the form of the Flame Temple. Leading up to it is an annoying cavern maze with falling rocks everywhere. It's got all sorts of Demonic Spiders, including the Dark Ropus, an enemy that drains your magic and leaves you with half a life-point when touched and is extremely fast, the Gray Magi, which requires a special spell to kill, teleports away fast, and drains your magic if its spells hit, and the Knight, which is only vulnerable from behind, blocks your hits, and has a good amount of power and health to boot. To make the level worse, it has a special gimmick involving pressing switches to advance through the level, and if you load a game or die (which will happen often), the switches will reset and you have to go through the temple again! And to cap it off, it's got That One Boss. Yikes.
  • The desert leading up to the Desert Temple isn't much fun, since you've got to deal with fast, stronger enemies than what you're used to that fire projectiles, and a frustrating maze involving one-way, conveyor belt-like quicksand. The Desert Temple is easy compared to the path leading to it.
  • The Wind Temple is a labryinthine five-floor Marathon Level chock-full of gusts of wind, Knights and Black Knights, and numerous one-way paths that require a guide to traverse properly. And the temple's item is located on a very out-of-the way path that can easily be missed, and isn't required to beat the level (but is required to reach The Very Definitely Final Dungeon). The Dark Knight boss is pathetic (unless you're trying to book it), as a consolation.
  • Even as the final level, The Dark Tower is an exhausting Marathon Level consisting of all six other temples. Health items are very scarce unless you deliberately farm the few enemies that drop them. The most common enemy past the first three floors is always Grey Magi. Because the level's so large, you get multiple warps through it — but if you die or load, have fun trekking through all the levels you've previously beat! Of course, the Wind Temple section is at least twice as long as the other levels, taking up nearly three floors. Have fun.
• The Sun Temple in Aquaria features a rather egregious number of timed jumping puzzles — in a game based around swimming. Hello there, floor — nice to see you for the hundredth time... and yes, the Frozen Veil features this too, but at least that's an optional zone.
• The Occupation of Arteria Carpals in Armored Core for Answer. The level consists of a fake briefing, crossing into the center of one of the worst battlefields in the game, hearing that the entire level is a trap to make you die, then seeing not 1, not 2, but 4 of them come flying in, ready to kill you. Your ally is worthless — they'll slaughter him in a matter of seconds, then they rush you. Unless you know exactly what you're doing (which essentially comes down to cheap tactics or sheer luck), you die, very quickly. Best part? The Hard mode version adds another enemy.
• Three-medaling some of the Challenge stages is exceptionally difficult in Batman: Arkham Asylum, but the Extreme version (i.e. more enemies to fight, more special enemies) of Shock and Awe takes the cake, biscuit and whatever else it can lay it's hands on. You fight in a room where the floor is electrified - it's not active, but after a time limit, it switches on and you automatically lose. You face knife-wielders from the first round, baton-wielders from the second, both in the third and both with lots of regular mooks in the last. The regular mooks can also run to a gun cabinet on another level of the room. And you have to rack up 30000 points.
  • The difficulty only really ramps up in the second stage of the challenge, as that's when the normal mooks run to the gun cabinet, ruining your combos and forcing you to jump up while being attacked. The solution? Jump up onto the right-side platform at the start of each stage, and Ultra-Batclaw pull the mooks as they come up. You'll disarm any baton-wielders and it doesn't count against your combo status, allowing you to pull off the 30k score easy. Just make sure you use Takedown on the knife guys whenever you get the chance.
  • In Story Mode, later in the game when you have to re-enter the building in which you started, things will be much hairier the second time you get to the room with gargoyles. For one, you can only stay on a gargoyle for around three seconds before it blows up - and all six Mooks will be carrying a firearm, which means that a) you must disable all of them while on foot; and b) if you get found out, they'll pile on you and most likely kill you in seconds. The area's increased difficulty stands out in that, at least in Normal difficulty, no other area features such a spike in difficulty.
  • Also in story mode are the two levels were being spotted - which includes having the other guards seeing knocked out thugs - are an automatic failure, saving Gordon from Harley near the end of the Medical Ward (which are even followed by the fight with Bane), and climbing up to the control room in the Aviary (which has less cover room than the other one; thankfully right afterwards you can beat up those guards you had to avoid, but after that, there are two Titan Henchmen you have to take on at the same time).
• Batman: Arkham City has the Catwoman DLC chapter involving fighting Two-Face himself and his legion of infinite Mooks (No, this is NOT a joke), the fact that, only if you have the Catwoman DLC chapters installed, you never need to worry about this, making it worthwhile NOT to install it, unless you REALLY want to struggle with the final optional DLC chapter after completing the regular main story. As Catwoman, you have FAR less flexibility that Batman does normally, and you have MUCH less bullet-protection armor meters than him as well, meaning you'll need to rely on stealth and ONLY alert him to your presence when you're finishing off his last thug stealthily that's next to him, though you'll need to Knockout Smash said last thug since you won't have time to fully Stealth Takedown his last mook next to Two-Face before he turns and discovers you, activating those respawning mooks. Although one can take few thugs before going for Two-Face, even if the fact he's also armed and that his henchmen will come to his aid guns blazing as you try pummeling him to defeat.
• Bomberman 64: The Second Attack has Sky Planet Horizon. There are two particularly annoying rooms. The first has you push four statues onto switches. Normally this would be easy, but the awkward angle of the room makes it difficult to get the control stick or pad at the right angle to push them. The second is a room full of enemies where tiles of the floor break, making it easy to fall to your death before you can get the jewel and get back into the elevator, and it would be very difficult to get the jewel without defeating the enemies.
• The level "It's a Trap!" in Chapter 8 of Buddy Rush has you fight 7 waves of enemies. Among the various enemies, you have go fight pelicans three times, you see. And then there's "Prove Your Friendship 3" in chapter 9, where you must protect a toilet from a bunch of mummies. You just can't kill them without letting them hit the toilet and to make things worse, four mummies appear at once during the battle!
• Illegal Communication has the maze room, where you have to blast your way through a Space-Filling Path filled with destroyable blocks. If you brush ever so slightly against a wall, you die (and the corridors are thin). Your character (controlled by mouse) moves with a lot of inertia, so if you ever move your mouse a bit too fast, you crash into a wall and die. The blocks you destroy regenerate very fast, so you have to be constantly on the move — if you try and move slowly to be safe, a block will respawn on top of you and kill you. And the Arkanoid room soon after that isn't much better. The paddle steers like a cow, the ball tends to bounce off corners at unexpected angles, and if you miss the ball even once, you die and have to redo the entire preceding, annoying platform sequence.
• Sand Zone in Cave Story. A giant level, in which you are forced to spend much time collecting the five Puppy Hats of Plot Continuation for what seems like eternity, deal with not one Wake-Up Call Boss, but TWO, get the first chance to miss out on the Spur, an Infinity +1 Sword, and go through the same area, the hardest in the area, multiple times to get three of the five aforementioned Puppies. Your reward? A Player Punch and becoming trapped in what is considered to be an inescapable dungeon.
  • Said inescapable dungeon, the Labyrinth. It is extremely long, throws in a number of things you need to do to get the best ending that are very easy to miss and two That One Bosses.
  • Final Cave (Hidden) is an enormous Difficulty Spike, with no save or health restoration points, spikes and lava pits everywhere that take off 10 health (out of 50) with each hit, requiring split-second timing with the Booster to pass that isn't present anywhere previously, and there's a miniboss two-thirds of the way through. It's only accessible when going for the Best ending, and it's all to give the player a taste of what's to come with the Sacred Grounds.
• Darksiders has the Black Throne towards the end of the game. The point of the dungeon is to reach, and then redirect three beams of light into the central chamber, which is easier said than done thanks to: extraordinarily tough enemies with relatively few health chests considering the size of the dungeon (and God help you if you die and start out with only a select number of health pieces, because Continuing is Painful; A miniboss that, while not entirely difficult, deals amazing damage. And you have to fight him THRICE; Hair-tearingly convoluted puzzles in almost every room, many of which you need to do twice, forwards and backwards; Actually redirecting the beams of light the right way has proven to be a Guide Dang It! for many players. There's also The Iron Canopy, especially for people with Arachnaphobia.
• The sequel Darksiders II has the mission that takes place on Earth, in which the gameplay changes to a third-person shooter where you are forced to fight swarms of zombies and bull-rushing demons. If you don't like using guns that is just too bad because its unfeasible to fight using melee weapons. You will spend the entire level carrying this big freakin' gun around slow as molasses as your only means of defense with all your combat options limited. And even worse, every time the swarm appears to bum-rush you, it's accompanied by this hellish howling that you will learn to hate it by the end of the level.
• Dead Rising for X-Box 360:
  • Case 7-2, the Bomb Collector mission. Imagine riding a motorcycle through a dark tunnel overflowing with zombies to gather bombs trying not to hit too many zombies lest you lose your motorcycle, leaving you on foot and screwed. All the while being chased by a guy in a moving van throwing grenades and trying to run you over. And bear in mind that every tunnel looks exactly alike, so unless you're bringing up your map every few seconds to double-check your position, it's very easy to get lost or miss an important turn.
  • The park in the center of the mall. It is a wide open area almost as big as the entire rest of the mall and only has 3 psychopaths to deal with compared to the dozen or so found elsewhere in the game. What makes it so hard? The 3 psychopaths work together and drive a jeep mounted with a turret throughout the level while the player can only move slowly on foot. The turret deals a decent amount of damage and causes the player to stumble when hit, making healing items impossible to use unless the player can somehow find cover (or is extremely quick). The convicts respawn if A: the player leaves the park without killing them all, or B: if it's a new day. And at the start of the game, the player only has 4 hit points and dying resets all progress since you last saved at a save point scattered about the mall. God help the poor bastard who tries escorting survivors through this place without killing the convicts first. If they can.
• Dead Space has the turret section where you have to protect the Ishimura from incoming asteroids. Some people found this part infuriating due to poor controls. The fact it only took a couple asteroid hits to fail this section didn't help matters.
• Level 10 from Evolva. You must reach the top of an island before it sinks, making it a Timed Mission. Besides the usual Zerg Rush of mooks, you have to pass through several locked doors, which only open using keys available in paths apart from the path to the top, and collect a pair of exploding spores in order to open the side path where one of the keys is. The worst part is, not only you have a limited time to reach the top, but a limited time to grab the items at the side paths. Waste even the slightest time in a point, and the game may become Unwinnable without you even noticing it, as the sea level may have risen enough to sinks parts of the next side path or even the item you must grab.
• The flashback sequences of Lucas' childhood in Fahrenheit, due to their horrible implementation of stealth based mechanics in what is otherwise an Action-Adventure game.
• Most of Futurama: The Game is fairly easy if you're concentrating, and even if you're not it never gets truly infuriating. But then halfway through MOM's Headquarters, it hits you with an extremely sharp, out-of-nowhere Difficulty Spike. To elaborate, MOM's HQ is divided into three levels where you play as Bender, Leela and Fry, in that order.
  • It starts out deceptively easy with Bender's section, though at one point you get locked in a room with an incomplete number sequence above the door opposite and numbered buttons on the sides. To open the door and progress, you must use these buttons to fill in the gaps in the sequence. In other words, you must solve a maths problem. This particular sequence, however, is trivial for anyone who knows how to count, so you beat that, blow through some Mini-Bosses, and move on to Leela's section.
  • Less than a third of the way into her area, the Number Sequence Puzzle Chamber returns with a vengeance, sporting a much less intuitive sequence to solve, and you realise how infuriatingly unforgiving it is. If you pick the wrong number or dawdle about for too long, the floor opens up beneath you and you fall to your death, wasting a life. So unless you're a maths prodigy, you have three options: consult a guide, pause the game and solve the problem in-depth with the aid of a notepad and calculator, or just press random buttons and hope for the best. But things only get worse once you finally make it through. The rest of the section beyond that room is a confusing maze of corridors which has you running back and forth collecting keys to open up rooms to get more keys, while dealing with obstacles that either move too fast or too slow, auto-turrets which fire instakill lasers, floating mines which must be dealt with by tricking said turrets into shooting them by running out in front of them, and worst of all, collapsible platforms where the collapsing is mirrored on the other side of the room, leaving you with barely enough room to breathe.
  • Then you move on to Fry's section and things settle down to merely annoying until you reach the armoury, where you must solve another Number Puzzle of Death to pick up a Railgun. Then when you get it, Mecha-Mooks start appearing in the hallways; they can be dispatched in a single hit with your Railgun but infinitely respawn, making them too pervasive and annoying to ignore but too weak to actually be a threat. Then you have to get past yet another Maths Room of Doom and another Key Hunt before being rewarded for your efforts with the opportunity to fight DESTRUCTOR! This enormous fellow is challenging only because his weak point only shows itself for a split second as he summons flying Action Bombs, and Fry's autotarget always prioritizes them, forcing you to stand still and manually aim at the weak point while the flying kamikaze robot bears down on you. Also, you better have replenished your health, or else you'll have to trick him into blowing open the door to a resupply room for you. At least they actually gave you a resupply room.
  • And THEN, just to add insult to injury, once you finally trash him, you're treated to an ending where the three heroes are unceremoniously crushed to death and the deal they traveled back in time to prevent ends up happening anyway, meaning that you went through all that rubbish for nothing!
• The rooftop level near the end of the Ghost in the Shell Playstation game. You go left a millimeter, you fall off the building. Go right a millimeter, you fall off the building. Try to climb the cable, you fall off the building.
  • The two Timed Missions in the game where you had to collect bombs strewn all over the levels under a tight, tight time limit. Cue the Rage Quit.
• In the PC game of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, most of the game is well-balanced, and not too hard to complete. However, the last level of the Hippogriff Flying minigame is super-tough to beat — it's a tricky Pass Through the Rings challenge, where you can only miss at most 3 rings, or you have to start over. And you have to beat it to complete the game.
• The PC Version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire had the Maze. Sure, it was easy enough (after a while) to get to the center and past the hedge wall that wants to eat you, but getting past the goddamned fire crabs are a pain in the ass if you don't know what to do.
• Illusion of Gaia:
  • The Atlantis-inspired level which involves lowering water levels, is filled with hard hitting enemies, is short on easily-obtained healing items (every Healing Herb is unique), and contains That One Boss even IF you know where to find the secret portal to Gaia so you can transform yourself into your knightly powerup mode. Because, hey guess what, the boss is a Vampire couple who've got one of your friends on a timebomb. So not only are they a BITCH to take out, you're fighting time, with a weakened character.
  • The Mountain Temple is an annoyingly homogeneous maze level with a music track you're probably sick of hearing by that point, and you only go there because of a marginally-relevant Fetch Quest given to you by some random NPC. At least the enemies aren't too tough.
• Indiana Jones licensed games:
  • Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb had an incredibly sadistic level near the end. A crazy Nazi starts chasing you in a drill tank. While running from the drill tank, you have to get across several Bottomless Pits. Doesn't sound too hard right? Here's the kicker: Some of the whip swing pits are very close together, and during the swing, you have to let go of the whip just slightly before you reach the terminus of the swing. If you let go just slightly too late, you will overshoot the small platform and fall into the next pit! To make matters worse, there are no checkpoints, so if you die, you have to start the whole level all over again, Unskippable Cutscene and all! At least the game doesn't make you run toward the camera!
  • In Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, the raft level. Yes, the goddamn raft level. You have to navigate a river, and you can't go too fast or too slow or you die for some reason. And then you have to time the jump off of the raft perfectly or you DIE and have to do it all over again. If you succeed, but die afterwards, you start at the point right before you have to make the jump, making it almost impossible to do it again. And after that, there's no indication of what to do. You can't change the camera angle for the jump, and Indy usually slides off the platform upon landing.
  • Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings has an equally frustrating last level. You have to swing a piano at Nazis. The problems? The piano is slower than your joystick, the unchangeable camera makes it hard to hit them, they're climbing ladders that, once they get part way up, you can no longer hit them, and if they shoot you once, you die. Never mind that you've been able to take multiple bullets before, one hit, you die.
• The Final Crusade of Kroz, level 9. Most of the level is filled with moving walls (invisible moving walls to boot), and you need to navigate around and through them to collect 9 keys and 3 wall-opening spells to beat the level. Naturally, the moving walls do their best to get in your way, ensuring that you will use up a ridiculous amount of whips before getting all the items. There are even stationary invisible breakable walls mixed in with the moving ones, as well as invisible teleport traps at the top of the level and invisible wall-generating traps around two of the keys that box you in. And just to add insult to injury, the blank space next to the tablet actually creates more walls in a way that makes the level completely impossible to beat. (The tablet even mocks you for triggering it!) AND the moving walls can even chase you down the top-left area of the level and get in the way of the boulders. You can whip the walls out of your way, sure, but if your whip should happen to destroy one of the boulders accidentally, you're in trouble. If this level sounds like it has any redeeming features...it doesn't.
• La-Mulana's Brutal Bonus Level, the Hell Temple. If you love Trial-and-Error Gameplay, "Land of Hell" rooms that take you back several rooms once completed, very finicky jumping puzzles, a Wall Jump room so sickeningly frustrating that you'll wish death upon the developers, and a man in a swimsuit as your reward, you will LOVE the Hell Temple. Not to mention the fact that the final puzzle requires you to leave the temple to collect an item necessary to complete this puzzle, making you redo the entire Hell Temple again. The kicker? You have to do this twice.
  • If you don't play Shoot Em Ups, have fun solving the puzzle in the 21st room of the Hell Temple, as it requires you to get 120,000 points in the Parodius clone PR3. Some players have gotten others to do this puzzle for them.
  • Also, the Twin Labyrinth is full of Demonic Spiders, is very confusingly arranged, is inaccessible for most of the game, has a sickeningly garish color scheme and terrible music, and is filled with confusing puzzles.
  • The aptly-named Confusion Gate, with its dark, ugly-colored background and creepy (yet awesome) music, starts with a maze of invisible ladders and teleporters that's impossible to find your way around without a guide, with glyphs that endlessly mock your incompetence, a complicated pedestal puzzle, and the fact that you have to leave the level to do a Fetch Quest. Then there's the puzzle to get the Flywheel, which involves hitting a bunch of pots twice each while using an item that makes time freeze but takes 3 minutes in-game to recharge (no waiting by playing minigames or listening to the in-game jukebox), a room full of disappearing ladders that can leave you trapped, and a room where you have to fight a giant bat...on a series of tiny platforms, in a room covered in spikes.
  • The Spring in the Sky, at least on the first visit. For one, it's filled with water, which not only drains your health at a very fast rate until you obtain the Scalesphere, but masks the Goddamned Bats that fill the game. The local enemies are also quite fast. But then there's the segment where you must ride a moving platform up a waterfall infested with... Surprise Fish. One hit from them will knock you off the platform, which will most certainly knock you into the water below. It's not easy to see where they come from, either. And don't get started on Bahamut.
  • The Tower of the Goddess, its backside equivalent. It's an entirely vertical level. Combine that with the game's finicky jumping physics and knockback, and it's pure frustration. Not to mention the invisible enemies; the item needed to reveal them is at the end of a long and annoying underwater side portion infested with said invisible enemies. And it's home to the balance puzzle for the Mace.
• Legacy of Kain:
  • Malek's Bastion in Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. You're a vampire in a bleak snowy castle in which all enemies are very durable animated suits of armor with no blood to suck. Worse, your blood level just degrades by itself over time, and health items are few and far between. Add annoying traps, a stark gray/pale map (the protagonist himself complains that his eyes ache from lack of contrast in voiceover!) and it gets frustrating/depressing very quickly.
  • The Cathedral in Soul Reaver, full of Vampiric Spider enemies and an area long puzzle. The puzzles are confusing, way too easy to screw up and having to back travel, but before then searching frantically feeling like you're stuck. The Spider enemies attack fast and dodge a lot, attack in numbers, one hit does a good amount of damage, and one hit from anything takes off the Soul Reaver. Since the spiders attack in numbers, you can't feed off them enough to replenish the Soul Reaver. There's also rooms with no items to kill the spiders with, which means you have to try very hard to kill them with the Reaver. Only at the very end, before the boss fight there's a warp room, which can be easily missed if you go down the wrong way. Easily the WORST segment of the game.
• LEGO Adaptation Games:
  • LEGO Star Wars has many:
    • Trying to get Jedi Master status (collecting enough studs to fill an onscreen meter) on the level "Defense of Kashyyyk" is downright infuriating, mostly due to the beach section that has you trying to use the Force to pull up plants to get studs as respawning enemies swarm everywhere, all after you. Pulling up the plants takes a few seconds, leaving you a sitting duck, and if you get hit you stop and have to try again. And when you die (which you will), most of your studs scatter everywhere as you rush to get them back before they disappear. Lose too many studs, and you'll most likely have to start the whole level over. Forget the Goddamned Bats, here you'll be cursing the Goddamned Clones, the Goddamned Droids, and ESPECIALLY the Goddamned Walkers. It doesn't help that you end up saddled with two of the game's weaker characters: Chewie can't dodge, and his melee attack in The Complete Saga takes forever and locks him in place, while Yoda walks with a cane whenever he's not jumping, which makes him aggravatingly slow.
    • The last level, "Darth Vader". First is a long series of runs and leaps over lava towards the camera, with any slip-up meaning you start over from the beginning. The second is a timed area where you have to solve a puzzle before you die instantly (you can extend the timer by building support beams, though). The third is a chase sequence along ledges, punctuated by puzzles, above lava. If you fail at any point, you have to start over from the beginning of the scene (though not the level, thankfully). Then you need to hopscotch across sinking metal platforms floating in a field of, oh, you get the idea. Then there's the fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan. One misjump, and you may be starting to notice a theme.
    • The podrace. Anakin's Pod is incredibly fragile, and takes damage whenever it's shot, whenever it hits something, whenever the wind is blowing in the wrong direction... and the game lacks Mercy Invincibility, and the Pod hurtles off whenever it takes damage, and it can take only four hits. Now imagine taking this vehicle, and navigating it through the same tight corners and caves you saw in the movie. But that's okay, all you need is some careful, deliberate timing... what, this is a race with an incredibly small window of error that dictates moving forward at all cost? Okay! And every time you die, you get sent back to a checkpoint 1/3 of the way through the level? And if there was a cutscene in that third, it plays again and you can't skip it? Okay! The worst part, though, is the middle of the second lap, which is when the Tusken Raiders start shooting at you while in an avalanche. Pick your poison: clipping a boulder, pinballing into three others and dying, or maneuvering through the maze, getting into a Tusken's line of fire, getting shot four times, and dying? The level was remade entirely for The Complete Saga, making the Pod considerably less fragile, removing the one-hit-kill pits, and making the margin of error considerably larger... and it was still hard! (At least in that version, you can replay the race as a TIE Interceptor and effortlessly leave Sebulba in your dust.)
  • "Dagobah" is frustrating because of the literal Goddamned Bats that interfere with Luke's efforts to raise Artoo to the timed mushrooms and are quite hard to hit with a lightsaber.
  • "Death Star Escape" in Lego Star Wars II, primarily for one incredibly frustrating sequence where you must build a huge object in order to continue. Enemies infinitely respawn during this segment, and unlike future Lego Adaptation games the player character is not invulnerable to damage while building constructs — if you take any damage at all, you immediately have to start over and build the construct from scratch. That means you have to carefully build only few pieces, stop, take out the respawning enemies, and repeat, and if you're just a fraction of a second too slow to stop building, all your work is going out the window. After this happens just a few times, don't be surprised if much swearing and hair-pulling follows.
  • Nothing in the Original Trilogy (at least in the PSP version) was as sadistic as Super Story, Ep. VI. You have to complete all 6 levels of an episode in under an hour, while collecting 100,000 studs. However, VI's levels are all long and filled with tedious and long puzzles. The AT-AT section of "Speeder Showdown" is where if you screw up, kiss your Super Story run goodbye — 30 minutes in. If you destroy the right shield generators first, you don't have enough space to destroy the rear one without backing up which takes about 3 minutes; if you're fast, you'll barely make it out in an hour. (In the Complete Saga version, the requirements are "100,000 studs or under one hour." It's a great improvement. Still challenging, since studs are scarce in VI, but no longer a reason to contemplate murder.)
  • LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars has nearly all of the Assault missions. The player is dropped with few or no soldiers, in a battlefield controlled almost entirely by the enemy, and has to build an army and either destroy the enemy forces or build an escape pod in a time limit, which is usually around 10 minutes, and there are thirty of these missions. Most of the time it's just easier to save up for Super Speeders (which costs 40 million studs) and use them to steamroll the missions instead of trying them the regular way.
  • "Harboring a Grudge" in LEGO Batman is annoying. About halfway through the level, you're harassed by police skiffs, who destroy you quickly and your main vessel turns pitifully slowly. Also, losing the Penguin Submarine means you lose all the torpedoes you have. To make it worse, the skiffs can shoot you underwater. Then there's that part where you have to press two buttons to activate a gate, each of which have spotlights that fire homing missiles at you. Irritatingly, getting seen disables the buttons until the missiles have exploded and a few seconds have passed, forcing you to deal with more police skiffs while dodging the missiles. Then there's a boss that sends waves of the aforementioned skiffs at you, while you try to go for torpedo runs. In all, not fun.
  • "The Black Lake" from LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4. Depth Perplexion is in full effect here — the level's essentially a sidescroller. This also means that the shells that must be destroyed for a House Crest piece and the targets to release trapped students can't be destroyed with the automatic aim — nope, you have to aim the shots manually. The main enemies not only have a time-consuming attack animation that prevents you from switching, they have Mercy Invincibility. And if the whole thing wasn't bad enough, the whole level is so dark it's a borderline Blackout Basement.
  • Then there's The Dead Marshes from LEGO The Lord of the Rings. It's not just that you have to drudge through the swamp to get to the other islands. It's not just that you have to go all over the place to perform puzzles to find water to fill your bucket. And it's not just that the place is rather dull-looking. No, it's that Gollum won't shut up. Every ten seconds he'll start urging you to hurry... while you're running all over the place doing puzzles. After the 5th time of "hurry Hobbitses, hurry!" But that's not all — there's also a really long stealth section where you must hide from the Ringwraith that flies above, killing you instantly if you're in view (and keeping you from proceeding). Think it's over? Wrong. Then you have to do a totally out-of-nowhere part where you must defeat two oliphaunts (or rather, their drivers).
• LEGO Island 2 features the rather infamous Fishing Minigame. Firstly, just knowing how to play the game is a Guide Dang It!. How so? The instructions are about as vague and generalized as they can be. What you're told is to use your bait to catch the big fish, Big Bertha, followed by a screen of the control legend telling you "Up" is strike, "Down" is reel in, "Shift" activates, and "Control" builds power and casts. This is about as non-specific as it can be, and learning it becomes a tedious trial-and-error process. How do you actually play the game, you ask? You press "Shift" to sit down and be able to fish, and cast with "Control". Then, you wait for the screen to say "Strike now!", where you press the "Up" key. You're supposed to know that the bar on the right of the screen is supposed to not go too high or low, and it gradually goes down. When you press "Down" it shoots back up. Keep repeating this until you pull the fish in. All of this, and the game expects you to come to this conclusion just by the information it gives you. This would be bad enough, but when you realize this is for kids, this is downright inexcusable. On top of all of this, the minigame is as boring as it could possibly be. Waiting for Big Bertha to come to you is entirely a Luck-Based Mission, and can either be done in five minutes or an entire hour. You just have to wait for her to bite the hook. Even when you think she's about to, she'll sometimes just turn around and swim away. Of course, there's minnows in the water too just to stall you even longer, as they can also bite your bait. They're entirely pointless unless you want more points, which probably won't happen. Plus, by the time it actually tells you to strike, you probably won't even remember what key you were supposed to press. And even if you do, you still have to figure out the whole bar thing. And thanks to a glitch, the part of it that is "too high" is a little bit lower than the top, so if you casted too hard, you won't even get a chance to do anything. Many never got past this part because it was so poorly explained and boring as it could be. Thankfully this was all cut from the PlayStation version due to space issues. Which of course didn't stop them from forgetting to take out all references to it.

M-Z

• Metal Slug 3 has its fifth and final mission, which is, in practice, the length of two missions that starts off with a side-scrolling shoot-em-up segment, followed by a redux of the first game's final boss. One Victory Fakeout later, your chosen character gets abducted by the Mars People, leading to a vertical shmup segment, followed by a long and grueling Battleship Raid against some of the toughest, most numerous, and most troublesome enemies the game can throw at you before finally reaching the final boss.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid Prime has the Phazon Mines, a massive Space Pirate mining complex. It's the dullest-looking part of the game by far, being nothing but gray rock and Phazon. It's most notorious for what's known as 'The Gauntlet', which you go through on your first visit. You have to go through half the level, fighting Mega Turrets, Wave-, Ice-, and Power Troopers, an Elite Pirate, more Wave and Ice Troopers, the Cloaked Drone, and an electrical morph ball maze, all without being able to save. It's generally considered the hardest part of the game. But it's still not over after 'The Gauntlet.' After obtaining the Plasma Beam, you have to go back through 'The Gauntlet' (easier this time) and into the deepest part of the Mine — another gauntlet full of completely dark rooms filled with Phazon and even more Beam Troopers. And then you fight an even BIGGER Giant Mook, the Omega Pirate. And if that wasn't enough, the music is rather creepy.
  • Metroid Prime also has the Phazon Core in the Impact Crater, which is the final room you have to traverse to face the Final Boss. It's also the most frustrating individual room in the entire game thanks to two things: it's filled with orange Phazon that damages you even with the Phazon Suit, and is home to infinitely respawning Fission Metroids. The latter being enemies that, as their name suggests, split into more Metroids (these ones only being vulnerable to specific beams). Phazon Core is navigated by jumping up a lot of small platforms, and the smallest misstep or attack by a Fission Metroid sends you all the way to the bottom. The only save point in the Impact Crater is near the entrance, and while there's a Mission Station at the halfway point of Phazon Core, it's naturally only recharges missiles, not the Power Bombs that are so effective against Fission Metroids and which you'll want to save for the Final Boss. To top it all off, the "music" of Impact Crater is indescribably bizarre and constantly repeats with no variation. Definitely one of the worst areas in the game, but at least it's not nearly as long as Phazon Mines.
  • Torvus Bog, from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. It's a cross between a swamp level and a sewer level, how could that possibly go wrong? ^note If you want to get technical, it's a submerged Luminoth temple. All the enemies are Goddamned Bats or Demonic Spiders, there's annoying water sections without the Gravity Suit (and in this game, you so much as dip your toe in water and it slows your ass down as if you were completely submerged), and half the bosses are That One Boss. One particular enemy, the "Grenchler", is a giant predatory beast that can only be hurt from the back...but the game then forces you to fight them in tunnels where you can't circlestrafe them several times. Then there's the lower half, the sewer half, which is a nightmare. The first time through, visibility is near-zero, making it painfully easy to walk right past important objects and not even know it. Movement is reduced to a crawl, enemies can come from any direction, and you have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to be doing. This segment can take hours without prior knowledge of the critical path. And thanks to bad save point placement and lack of other save points, if you die to the Alpha Blogg (which you will), you can potentially count on repeating the entire lock puzzle to open the door to the boss room.^hint You can ...save some time by climbing out and saving before the last lock, of course. The dark version of Torvus Bog is also incredibly annoying to navigate and introduces a lot of Demonic Spiders that will later become mainstays, and the area has arguably the worst key collection, which have little rhyme or reason for being where they are. At least the music is nice, considered one of the best tracks in the series and a welcome reprieve from Agon Wastes' duller, more atmospheric tracks.
  • The Space Pirate Homeworld in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
    • In contrast to the previous two beautifully-detailed worlds (post-apocalyptic Magitek ruins Bryyo and steampunk floating city Elysia), this place's color scheme is an endless flood of red and black in a dark mechanical world with little scenery. The corridors are narrow and mazelike, there are numerous annoying enemies and bosses (Commando Pirates, Gandrayda, and the Hatcher Metroid say "hi"), and there's lots of backtracking. The acid rain also eats through your health like nothing else until you get the necessary item. And the whole place is topped off with an Escort Mission (though it's not too bad, your escortees are pretty skilled). After all this madness, you'd expect to have an original boss, right? Nope, it's Ridley. Again.
    • An annoying part of that world is destroying the Command Center's shields. After climbing up a tower and constantly being attacked by strong Space Pirates, you have to destroy these power units to remove forcefields around a Bomb Slot (which completes the mission upon use). The trouble starts then. You have to destroy said power units by using the X-ray Visor to find them behind plates of phazite and shoot the moving orbs inside with the Nova Beam. Only problem is, a pair of Commando Pirates drops in, one of which instantly goes into Hypermode. You have to stop what you're doing (since any enemy that uses Hypermode in the room jams your X-ray visor; this also makes it difficult to shoot them in the head with the X-Ray/Nova Beam combo and kill them instantly) and blast both of them with your own Hypermode. And once you kill a pair, ten seconds later another pair drops in and one of them goes Hypermode. Rinse and repeat 10 times until you manage to even find all three of the power units. And right afterwards is the Escort Mission!
  • Phaaze. You have to complete the whole level under a strange time limit/health that depends on your Energy Tanks. If you skimped out on Energy Tanks, you will have to rush through the place. Getting hit by enemy attacks will reduce the time remaining, and there are only a few spots where you can increase the time remaining. There's annoying segments where you have to destroy barriers with the Hyper Ball, which is very short-ranged and weak, as well as a spot where you have to kill a small, durable creature that constantly moves around in an enclosed space without being able to lock on to it while you're assaulted by Metroids. It's also filled with numerous one-time scans. That patch of reskinned Venom Weed you didn't notice before you fell down the shaft and only appeared in that one place? That had a logbook entry. Time to start the whole sequence over! And at the end... two Final Bosses, the first of which is That One Boss and the second of which has two phases and is designed to stall. The place is interesting, but the amount of neon blue is an eyesore.
  • Metroid: Zero Mission has the Zero Suit level: You're in a spaceship infested with laser-shooting pirates without your Power Armor, a completely useless shock pistol as your only weapon, Everything Is Trying to Kill You and you can only take as many hits as you have health tanks (which is 9+1 max). Even worse, Hard Mode decreases that number since Energy Tanks only give 50 health per.
  • Metroid Fusion has the reactor level. The power for the station gets knocked out, and you have to find out what caused it and turn it back on. For the first part, all Save and Recharge Rooms are offline, so you have to fight through a long string of rooms before getting to Yakuza, a giant spider that falls squarely into That One Boss territory. After that, there's a newly-activated-but-easily-missable Save Room, and then a long, aggravating SA-X chase sequence. Finally, you get to go through Sector 2 again, this time filled with Ki-Hunters, ending with Nettori, who is also immensely frustrating, although less so than Yakuza. The Space Jump and Plasma Beam are a decent prize, though.
  • Metroid: Other M:
    • There's the lava segments of the Pyrosphere. Several times you must dash through long stretches where you take constant damage and the lava is difficult to get out of should you fall in. In addition, the enemies have tough-to-dodge attacks and it's tough to see where you are thanks to the camera system. However, the Varia Suit function isn't authorized until far into the area. Then there's the volcano ascent, where you have to outrun a rising wall of magma and there's very little room for mistakes and no time to waste whatsoever.
    • The pixel hunt scenes range from counterintuitive (Everyone's gawking at Lyle's body, so you have to turn around and lock onto a green puddle of blood directly behind you on green grass), to Needle in a Stack of Needles (One moving leaf among several identical other leaves) to outright WTF (Finding the bridge and the lava dump right before Ridley — both of them being in pitch black darkness!)
• Naruto: Rise of the Ninja has its racing levels. They are especially difficult when you have to use chakra concentration and climb up buildings. Never mind the fact that Chakra Concentration takes FOUR SECONDS to charge up to use, and another second and then ANOTHER four if you fail.
• In Nicktoons Unite!, there's the Fantastic Voyage of Goddard is considered to be the hardest level in the console version of Nicktoons Unite!. The level drags on forever, the enemies are all over the place, and are more powerful, the Giant Fleabot boss is relentlessly difficult, and if you get a Game Over at any point of the level, you have to start the entire level all over again.
• The on-foot missions in NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams are hell to get through, especially the ones in Memory Forest and Crystal Castle. Good luck passing, let alone A-Ranking.
  • Sky Concert is another annoying example — NiGHTS flies a bit slower than you need to hit the notes in time of the music, and you're only allowed a few misses before getting a Game Over.
• Ōkami:
  • Special mention of the Blockhead enemies. In order to beat them you have to watch for a sequence of flashes, and then dot the spots in which they appeared in order. The first few are okay, but try getting the one with eight dots right when you only have a few seconds to watch the flashes! In fact, the later Blockheads are so infuriating that there have been instances where players have drawn on the TV screen with dry erase markers and lipstick in order to track down all the dots in time. Sometimes, it has to be a team effort, with one person doing the monitor drawing and the other handling the game controls. And this was supposed to be a single player game...
  • The Demon Gate Trials. If these weren't optional, the game would probably go into Nintendo Hard. Remember to bring about 100 or more of each type of healing item plus attack/defense upgrades, because you'll need them!
• The metroidvania Pharaoh Rebirth has the fifth stage, the Sinai Mines. It's a whole level based on the dreaded "minecart sequence" (but with a car actually) where you have to jump over pits and avoid obstacles, and as such it's very repetitive, frustrating, overly long, and in the second part you have to shoot flying enemies on top of that. And there's a Kaizo Trap at the very end. It also breaks the flow of what was a typical platforming metroidvania adventure until then. The only saving grace are the kickass BGM and the tough but fair boss fight against the god Medjed at the end.
• The Shark Tale game has some particularly frustrating levels due to Fake Difficulty:
  • Chapter 3: "We interrupt this broadcast..." is a major stumbling block for younger players. While the first few levels are simple stages that give you plenty of room for error and allow you to explore the game's mechanics at your own pace, Chapter 3 turns the game into a Rhythm Game of all things with loads of surprisingly quick inputs to pull off one after the other and a required score of 70% to pass. And this is just the 4th level!
  • Chapter 19: "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words", a race stage featuring Oscar and Lenny, is especially frustrating. Unlike the other race stages which were simply designed around getting to the end as fast as possible, the goal is to get to the end while destroying a certain number of newspapers, a task made monumentally frustrating due to Lenny's odd physics, the inability to go back if you miss a paper and the incredibly strict time limit of 3:50. It becomes even more frustrating if you're trying to go for 100% Completion - while the standard mission of destroying forty papers and making it to the end without running out of time is already difficult, the bonus and elite objectives are even worse: the bonus objective requires you destroy nine newspaper stands that are difficult to even see, and the elite objective requires you destroy all seventy papers.
• Sly Cooper possesses several examples:
  • Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus
    • In Sunset Snake Eyes, the level "At the Dog Track". A race against four opponents who are faster than you in every possible way. And the steering controls are really shitty. And the car comes to a complete stop if you hit anything larger than a molecule. And if you turn a corner too sharply, you'll slow down for several precious seconds, causing your competition to get an even bigger lead. There are speedboosters available, but half the time they either cause you to crash into the nearest obstacle(on account of the fixed camera so you can't see what's ahead of you for half the race) or, if you happen to use it near the middle-point of the track, you'll flip your car completely over onto its back, and when they do work properly, it's rarely, if ever, enough to gain any significant ground at all. Later in the game, you have to do it again, but it's even more difficult than before.
    • In Tide of Terror, there's "Treasure in the Depths", an Unexpected Gameplay Change with a mandatory minigame where the player has to break open 50 chests while making sure none of the fast moving crabs gets a single one. It requires much faster reflexes than any of the levels previously, and most of the ones after it.
    • Another mandatory minigame that is quite difficult is "Down Home Cooking" in Vicious Voodoo, which requires you to kill 50 chickens in 90 seconds. The area you have to do this in is quite large and has several obstacles to make things difficult. But the really annoying part is the pair bomb-toting roosters that randomly appear, which are faster than you and will kill you if you so much as get close to one. Also in the same world is "Piranha Lake", which requires you to light 25 voodoo torches with the swamp craft's flamethrower. The flamethrower is fueled by running over fast-moving, skittish piranhas. You can only hold 5 shots at most, and you have 2 minutes to light all the torches in the large area. Do the math.
    • Most of The Cold Heart of Hate is quite difficult and annoying. "A Hazardous Path" is a long rail shooter with very sensitive aiming, which is not good when your targets are fast-moving Robo-Falcons or clusters of mines. "Burning Rubber" forces you to collect 60 computers while preventing the hordes of fast-moving lava slugs from doing the same, with the driving controls you've learned to hate. "A Daring Rescue" is short, but requires tricky platforming, and there's no lucky horseshoes anywhere; plus, if you trip the alarms, they're staying on. "Bentley Comes Through" pits you through a different shooter, where the targets you're trying to destroy to obtain the code pieces will split into pieces and cause damage, as well as the security algorithms that will One-Hit Kill you with their homing shots. Then there's "A Temporary Truce", which is a "protect Murray" Escort Mission from Hell. Then comes "Sinking Peril", a very long Rise to the Challenge level where a single slip-up sends you back to the beginning. The next level? "A Strange Reunion". This world is no fun.
    • "A Temporary Truce" is an especially bad case that needs elaboration. You're forced to shoot the various enemies and obstacles in order to help Sly reach his cane. It's the same as the previous levels where you had to do the same with Murray, so what's so bad about that? Well, some of the enemies come out of nowhere, which means Trial-and-Error Gameplay is in full effect. While with some of them, you can tell by Sly's reaction, others come from right behind him. Plus, compared to Murray's screams and running for cover, Sly simply runs backwards, if at all. It's a short level, but infuriating.
  • Sly 2: Band of Thieves
    • There are three levels where Sly must sneak through to a particular point hidden inside a TNT barrel. The first is comparatively easy, but the second can be either easy or Nintendo Hard depending on the starting position of guards. It helps to whack them with Murray in the section of the mission preceding it. The last, however, is horrendously frustrating, requiring the player to go all over Arpeggio's blimp (itself That One Level, due to Disappointing Last Level), pick up 3 chargers for a TNT barrel, and blow up the door to a generator. Sounds easy? Well, the level is full of narrow platforms, slow guards who synchronize their walking schedules, take half a minute to calm down if they see anything suspicious and instantly kill Sly if they bump into him, fast rotating spotlights that can blast Sly to pieces if he so much as moves a muscle inside them, and on top of that, Sly can't jump out of the barrel the whole time. The only saving grace the level has is an Anti Frustration Feature that lets Sly keep the chargers he has already loaded up and plonk him in a convenient spot outside of the barrel, where he can take out the guards in his immediate area.
    • Another obnoxious mission is the one where you must carry a beetle to Rajan's office. To make things difficult, said beetle starts buzzing loudly after 10 seconds pass, which attracts the attention of all enemies nearby. To stop it, you have to put the beetle in water pools scattered about the level; however, since it's not really that obvious where they are, it devolves into a mad dash for the area you have to reach while enemies are chasing you. And did I mention that taking any damage forces you to start over? Available at the exact same time as the above-mentioned mission is the mission where you have to steal Rajan's blueprints. To do this, you have to follow him, but not too far away, as that'll fail the mission, or not too close, bec— "A VIPER IN THE GRASS!" and you fail the mission. You have to shoot darts to lure him over to the watermelons that will make him fall asleep when he eats them so you can steal a blueprint. Unfortunately, you're doing this as Bentley, which means your combat and mobility options are very limited. To make matters worse, Rajan only falls asleep for a very short amount of time, and if you're too slow, th— "A VIPER IN THE GRASS!" and you fail. At least you keep the blueprints you've collected if you fail.
    • Rajan is at least even-handed in his obnoxiousness, because to go with the terrible Sly and Bentley missions, there's also a terrible Murray mission! You need to take a huge ruby to the destination, which wouldn't be so hard if the gem wasn't the most fragile thing on the planet. While holding it, you can't jump, attack, take a hit or even sneak, leading to a point where Bentley decides — for no apparent reason — that he should take a shortcut that you can't, and without Bentley's platforms you cannot put the ruby down without it shattering like your controller when you throw it against the wall.
    • If there ever was such a thing as Platform Hell in the Sly Cooper series, the sequence while fighting the final boss has to be it. You have to paraglide across a mess of falling platforms and debris in order to reach the final boss and take it out. But the debris and platforms are moving and twisting around so much that you've got to be exact on your jumps and gliding to reach each one, or fall to your death. Sometimes you might run into a small piece of debris which stops everything. It's not exactly a short sequence, either. And falling just once forces you to start this mess all over again.
    • The mission in Episode 7 where Sly must steal an eagle egg so it can be used to distract Jean Bison during the Lumberjack Games, which themselves also qualify. You must use the updraft created by some destroyed oil mains to ascend high into the sky and fly to an iceberg where the eagle's nest is. This would be pretty easy were it not for the flock of eagles that attack Sly when he's on the final path to the nest — the eagles are much bigger than they look and you instantly fail the mission if you so much as brush against one; you practically have to turn a 90 degree angle to avoid them. Again, this wouldn't be so bad, except that every time you fail the mission, you have to waste two minutes riding the updrafts again. As for the Lumberjack Games themselves, they start off easy — when playing as Bentley, you're given more than enough time to sneak the egg into Jean Bison's pocket despite the fact that you crawl along at the speed of molasses — but then comes the part where Murray must use grappling hooks to pull Jean Bison off the ice wall. The hooks always shoot about a mile above where you actually aimed them, they swerve off to the side, Jean Bison leaps about unpredictably, and if you miss you have to mash the X button or the hook will take an eternity to come back — all of which makes actually hitting him with all three hooks before he reaches the top an exercise in hair-pulling; it's enough to make the rest of the Games and the subsequent boss battle a Breather Level. At least the game immediately lets you try again if you fail.
  • Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves
    • "The Dark Current" where Dimitri must swim to retrieve Sly's cane. It goes into a watery tunnel requiring luck and lightning fast reflexes to survive. Dr. M's Sea Creature is easy by comparison. Or not.
    • The first part of "Operation: Wedding Crasher" is an exercise in patience. Here, you have to drive a difficult-to-control RC car through a maze of blue lasers. Destroying a security node by running into or shooting it fails the mission. Accidentally tripping a blue laser fails the mission. Destroying the glass windows fails the mission. And some of the laser fields move; some of those force you to go through very tight spaces, and the RC car hates to turn tightly. Screwing up forces you to start all over. Have fun. At least you get to blast all of the things to bits at the end... but good luck finding them all in time.
    • Right before that, you get to experience RC car hell in Down the Line. The RC car does not like to turn properly, the camera doesn't like to follow you, and it flips around if you bump into anything taller than a loaf of bread. Now take that and go through a long timed race while being assaulted by fire dragon heads and having to destroy rocks with a cannon that overheats quickly and cools down very slowly. And if you destroy a TNT barrel, it'll take off nearly half your health.
    • Lastly, there's "Stand Your Ground", a brutal Multi-Mook Melee against a huge amount of extremely vicious mutants. They can take quite a beating, and have annoying moves that'll take off your health like nothing. The cobra-headed mutants throw bombs and have scream attacks that send out slow projectiles that make any attempts to fight them head-on impossible, and the lobster-clawed ones can block your attacks and throw their claws, which cause huge knockback. If you don't have the Juggernaut Throw, this is just about impossible.
  • Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time
    • The Murray Games, which isn't so much difficult as very, very long and drawn out. How appealing does an at-least ten minute long Training Montage consisting entirely of Waggle and Press X to Not Die, all the while peppered with annoying penguin sound effects, sound? It consists of six different minigames you have to complete. They're mostly easy, except for the balance and slingshot minigames. The former requires you to use SixAxis controls to keep an egg from rolling off the wooden beam "Bob" holds, all while penguins are jumping on the platform and shifting it constantly, and you have to last 25 seconds with this. The latter requires you to sling penguins at these targets that pterodactyls hold, but sometimes the controller acts up and refuses to sling a penguin (and you can only miss up to three). But once you beat all six of the minigames, you have to go through a lightning-quick barrage of these minigames. And there, hoo boy does the balance game ramp up in difficulty. You don't have to last nearly as long, but on the other hand the platform is tilting extremely quickly, back and forth, constantly.
    • On that note, the entire world "Clan of the Cave Raccoon" is one huge Scrappy Level. There are very few missions where you get to play as Sly and the area is very difficult to navigate without the ability to walk on ropes and spires, an ability which his prehistoric ancestor lacks. Since you mostly play as Murray and Bob, you're in for an onslaught of minigames like the obnoxious Murray Games (Mentioned above) and the needlessly long climbing mission where you have to keep from waking Pterodactyls (Which seems to have no real technique to it outside of Trial-and-Error Gameplay). It's also a huge letdown to go from Tennessee Kid Cooper and his infinite ammo revolver cane to Bob Cooper, who's essentially Murray with the ability to climb.
• Spartan Total Warrior has an Escort Mission in which you have to guide the mathematician Archimedes through a horde of Roman Legionaries. This suffers from a total lack of checkpoints of any kind despite an incredibly long setup, a gigantic map in which everything looks the same, having nowhere near the supplies you need, and having far too many mooks for the button-mashing hack-and-slash combat engine to stand up to while protecting Archy. The kicker, however is that he is suicidal. It's one thing for a frail old man to be unable to keep up with the cream of the Spartan military, but willfully running into fires is quite another.
• The developers' insistence on putting chase missions into every single 3D Spider-Man game ever made. Including some requiring you to escape from an enemy while web-swinging toward the camera.
  • Ultimate Spider-Man:
    • Chasing Electro. Imagine the person you're chasing can fly and has the ability send you flying (and usually plummeting afterward) in the opposite direction if you get anywhere near them.
    • The third level where you play as Venom. It starts out with a fight against Silver Sable, which is good fun, but afterwards, the rest of the level is just fighting mooks, running towards a checkpoint, rinse and repeat. It's incredibly repetitive and just isn't fun.
  • In Spider-Man 2, you had to web swing on these freaky floating (fake) UFOs to the Statue of Mysterio on Liberty Island. Unless you were already close to the island, one slip-up would start you over from the beginning.
  • In Spider-Man (the game based on the movie), the level Race Against Time goes from challenging to damn near-impossible on the higher difficulties. Firstly, you've got bombs you've got to disarm, and have to reach them immediately. Secondly, there are these insanely powerful robots you've got to face which are not only hard to damage (unless you've got the unlimited webbing cheat on), but can attack you from an ridiculous rangea and take off roughly three-quarters of your health in one hit.
• 2099 Doctor Octopus' stage in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. Exploding kamakazi critters, giant teleporting lizard-things, regular enemies a-plenty (including lots of huge mooks and shielded mooks), a very long and difficult protect mission, and to top it off the stage takes a long time to complete.
• Level 3-5 in Twisted Pixel's 'Splosion Man. The level is basically two long sessions of Rising To The Challenge, where a single mistimed explosion is going to drop you onto a bed of spikes. Slip up or miss one of the fulcrums? Back to the start. And to get the cake, you have to finish the level... and then turn around at the exit door and trigger a set of platforms. Miss a jump on the way back down from the cake? Back to the checkpoint! To put into perspective how much this level is reviled, Twisted Pixel brought a punchbag to Penny Arcade Expo with a dev's face and the caption "I Made Level 3-5". The poor bag never stood a chance.
• Star Fox Adventures:
  • The Test Of Fear. It takes about half a dozen failed attempts to even figure out the controls for the damn thing, and even then how hard your little cursor thing moves seems completely arbitrary. Even after you learn where the biggest cursor movements come in, it still takes near-superhuman reflexes to react on time.^note The cursor's movement speed is based on how far you move the control stick. This wouldn't be too bad if the visuals weren't so distracting, and the fact that the meter gets smaller as time goes on.
  • There's also Lightfoot Village, the area you have to get through beforehand, since it has two tests prior. Though the Tracking Test won't be too much trouble provided you know the area well, the Test of Strength is basically Button Mashing gone horribly wrong. Becomes insulting when the Krazoa version of said test is taken much later in the game, for it being too easy.
  • Dragon Rock. Already a very intimidating-looking Bleak Level, it requires sheer dexterity for the shooting segments. Which are also needed for Drakor.
• Tasty Planet:
  • The first game features a few irritating whole worlds.
    • While the Ocean world is very short and has a simple set of objects consiting of three fishes, a dolphin and a shark, they vary a lot in size. And because their thin and long shapes are very distinct from the Grey Goo's round one, it's hard to know which ones you can eat. Not helping is that any of them bigger than you will chase and eat you.
    • Most of the Cosmos world's levels share the Ocean's Everything Trying to Kill You principle and confusing ways to distinguish which objects are larger or smaller than you, but at least they don't actually chase you.
    • When it comes to individual levels, Cosmos 4, the level with the black hole, is near impossible to beat in timed mode. Being too close to the black hole as you're eating stars risks you colliding with it and dying, and being too far away from it makes it harder to eat incoming stars since they'll be further apart.
  • There are a few levels in Tasty Planet: Back for Seconds where you have to race against other creatures to eat enough stuff before they eat it all and cause you to fail the level. The first one of this kind is the worst, because you're up against a pair of mice that move very fast.
  • In Tasty Planet Forever, "Get To Bee Choppah", a bonus level with the bee, is a nightmare to beat with three stars. The level has quickly-respawning helicopters and fighter jets which move fast, can hurt you with their propellers, and fill the screen with heat-seeking missiles and bullets to near Bullet Hell levels. The more you grow, the harder it is to avoid the sheer quantity of projectiles aimed at you, and getting hit even once means a significant penalty to your size and score. Good luck trying to get three stars on this level on Deadly difficulty, as the propellers become lethal on touch!
• ToeJam & Earl: The first game has Level 22 which is a large sandy mass populated by Boogeymen and Phantom Ice Cream Trucks, two enemies that do major damage. God help you if a spaceship piece is on that level in random play.
• Tomb Raider III has Caves of Kaliya and Lud's Gate.
  • Caves of Kaliya is The Maze with a boss fight at the end and very little else at all (it is at least very short when you know the way out).
  • Lud's Gate is partially made up of an underwater maze, and it has a somewhat inexplicable path split that, rather than providing two different routes (like other levels with one) you simply miss about a quarter of the level if you make a mistake at one point. The previously mentioned underwater maze also happens to have a vehicle in it that actually makes things harder if you use it. Finally it feels quite thrown together thematically, which adds further scrappy factor considering it comes after the level many consider one of the games atmospheric/thematic highlights (along with it doing nothing with a somewhat interesting subplot with "The Damned").
• Tomb Raider: Anniversary has The Great Pyramid; not only was the level massively cut down from the original game's version, but what was there has been replaced a shaft climb that many found incredibly difficult and frustrating.
  • The Obelisk of Khamoon is this for first-time players who do not know that a certain switch in a particular room triggers spinning blade traps that make the room a lot harder, and unlike every other switch in the game, is not necessary or beneficial in any way.
• Tomb Raider: Underworld:
  • The first stage, Mediterranean Sea, begins with a massive underwater area where you have to find two missing axles to open a gate, and the second is in another structure somewhere. For first-time players, even if they've just beaten Legend and Anniversary, it can be frustrating and confusing, as well as navigating the ruins once you are above water and figuring out how to get to where you need to to kill the kraken. And it ends with escaping from a sinking boat in Uncharted fashion. At least for this stage you can't drown. But for perspective, the final stage also begins with an underwater level, and despite there being more to do, it's a lot easier to find and do everything.
  • Some parts of Coastal Thailand involve fights with giant lizards that attack in packs and are so fast that first-time players could have difficulty dodging them. The green ones can die pretty fast but the red ones take longer to kill, and a few of these fights are on relatively small platforms with a sheer drop on most sides.
  • Southern Mexico is standard Tomb Raider fare for the most part, but the eitr room at the end involves plenty of Guide Dang It! jumps, in partcular a grapple jump where you raise the eitr the second time. On that note, both times you raise the eitr, you might not be expecting it, and it could kill you before you climb clear of it and swing to land. All those Thralls that emerge from the eitr are probably alternate Laras who fell into it on your first playthrough.
• Tomb Raider II's Temple of Xian. The game tricks you by putting the dagger right down a suspiciously empty hallway, but as soon as you get within a few feet of it, the floor opens up beneath you and immediately springs two traps on you at the same time! Let's just say Lara's day doesn't get any better afterward.
• Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness had quite a few, which at times made it frustrating with the various glitches in the game:
  • The Hall of Seasons. Lara has to collect four stones (found in four different levels within the Hall of Seasons). If one knows what to do, it shouldn’t be a problem, but if you don’t know where to go and Lara flicks the wrong switch to go to retrieve the crystal, she’ll end up in a basement full with a series of deadly traps. If Lara flicks the correct switch, getting these crystals is a hard task:
    • The Breath of Hades: Lara has to jump on logs across the room to get the Air Crystal, sounds easy, but with the said breath of Hades makes it difficult to jump on the logs.
    • Sanctuary of the Flame: Lara has to make her way across the room to retrieve the Fire Crystal. Oh and just to mention, fireballs will be flying all over the place, and Lara could fall into the lava.
    • Neptune’s Hall: An underwater level with deadly spikes, as well as an undead fire knight preventing Lara to retrieve the Water Crystal.
    • Wrath of the Beast: Lara has to traverse her way through broken ledges (thanks to a statue falling and damaging the entire floor) to retrieve the Earth Crystal, after getting the crystal, Lara has to avoid the undead fire knights when the floor returns.
  • Now back to the Hall of Seasons. After getting the crystals, Lara has to make her way to the top of the room, but Lara needs to get a strength upgrade to climb to the top of the room, and many players found this climb very frustrating. after the climb, Lara has to face the spirit of Brother Obscura, who some players see as That One Boss.
• Uncharted:
  • Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is enjoyable on the whole, but has a couple of "why why why" moments.
    • The jumping-around-on-ruins-and-between-ledges mechanics are smooth and allow you to rapidly get through areas. However, in one part of the game you must jump around the walls, pillars and chandeliers high up in a large building, making your way over to two switches on opposite sides of the room. This is perfectly fine up until the point where you have to make it across an innocent-looking jump (almost identical on both sides) from some planks to some other planks. Where Nathan's been happy to do semi-automatic jumps and physics-defying jumps between tiny ledges earlier, these two gaps cause him to have a brain aneurysm and forget how to jump long, instead deciding to take a short leap and then forget how to grab ledges.
    • There's two segments where Nate and Elena ride a jet ski that handles very poorly while being shot at by several enemies and either dodging or blowing up explosive barrels in their path that will kill them instantly if touched. In spite of this, the first one isn't so bad, due to Elena wielding a grenade launcher with unlimited ammo, and taking place on a flat, calm riverbed, making it easier to move around and find cover to pick off both the enemies and barrels. The second time though is beyond frustrating, due to having them climb up a series of rapids and falls which is constantly making the vehicle control even worse than normal, the barrels are constantly moving down the rapids and some of them can't be seen until right after you climb the top of one leading to surprise deaths, and there's very little cover making it far easier to have multiple enemies pick you off. Elena also loses her grenade launcher for a standard handgun, and while it also has unlimited ammo it takes far more shots from it and precision aiming to pick off enemies from afar as opposed to the wide-ranged one-hit kill power of the grenade launcher, giving them more time to get a lucky shot off, kill you, and force you to do the whole thing over again.
    • The final gunfight is a hair-pulling exercise in trial and error, too, unless you're a shotgun expert by then. The game's mook turned Big Bad, Atoq Navarro, cannot be killed until the quick-time sequence at the end of the fight, and wields an insta-death automatic shotgun that, unlike other weapons, hits you even if you're rolling and has perfect accuracy, meaning if you jump out of cover when he's firing, you're dead, no questions asked, regardless of difficulty. To add to the chaos, there are a ton of soldiers in the way, and after the first quarter of the fight, you end up behind breakable crates, which the Big Bad shoots to pieces. So you have to memorize where the enemies appear, take them down quickly enough to avoid running out of cover, and not waste your ammo on the invincible-even-though-he-isn't-armored Big Bad. It all ends with another trial-and-error mess in which you have to figure out exactly when to dodge between crates.
  • Uncharted 2: Among Thieves features a couple chapters that make even the most hardened explorers weep, especially on higher difficulties.
    • Chapter 11: Keep Moving. One of your allies whom you just met takes a bullet before the level starts, and you are forced to spend the majority of it carrying him along, limiting your combat options to your pistol and preventing you from taking cover, all while being flanked from every vantage point you can see and with dwindling pistol ammo reserves on higher difficulties. Even more insulting, once you make it through this section, the game has the escortee killed off anyways by the Big Bad in a cutscene. Great.
    • Immediately following this is Chapter 12: A Train to Catch. It is comparatively short, but features a couple of grueling Hold the Line segments back-to-back that can be nightmarish on higher difficulties:
    • In the opening portion of the level in the small villa, regardless of whether or not you chose to stealth your way across the courtyard segment, you have to shoot off wooden hinges on a door so Elena can get past, which alerts the attention of several waves of enemies. You're also stuck hanging on a signpost several feet off the ground while this happens, and you have to erratically vault between sides to avoid fire from enemies coming in to ambush you from behind. Thankfully, the game is generous enough to give you infinite ammo during this part.
    • The true challenge of this level rests in the second Hold the Line segment, where you find yourself stuck in a train car ambushed by droves upon droves of militia men from all angles. You're given plenty of sniper rifle ammunition in the train car, and you will need every last bullet to take out the seemingly never-ending wake of insta-kill snipers, insta-kill grenadiers, and infantrymen who can easily approach from any unguarded opening and riddle you with holes while you're still in cover. And just when you thought the game couldn't throw any more at you, you get your first taste of the nigh-invulnerable, heavily-armored, minigun-toting heavy weapons troops, in the midst of what is already one of the hardest shootout sections in the entire series. Trying to beat this part on Crushing difficulty or higher? Pray.
    • Chapter 20: Cat and Mouse, in which you, Drake, are the mouse, and the cat in question is a goddamn tank that chases you through the entire level. It's not so much the tank you have to worry about, though — it's the dozens upon dozens of armored shotgun soldiers and RPG-wielders perched at every corner trying to catch you off guard, and yes, you need to kill the mooks with the RPGs so you can destroy the tank, which you have limited ammo supplies for throughout the entirety of the level sans the very end. And, of course, there are hidden collectibles throughout this level, which you have to collect while being constantly hounded by the tank.
    • Chapters 22 and 23: The Monastery and Reunion, both of which have dozens of vertically-oriented shootout sections, some of which you can stealth your way through, and most of which you can't, despite what some of the dialogue suggests. Lap on some turret sections, shootout sections with very little cover and the ever-present threat of ammo scarcity, and it becomes clear why these two chapters are so well loathed.
• Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception ups the ante with a mix of Checkpoint Starvation and much more aggressive Mook AI:
  • The climax of Chapter 9: The Middle Way is an Escort Mission where you start off unarmed and have poor cover options, making just getting around an excercise in trial and error.
  • Chapter 12: Abducted has multiple tedious vertical shootouts made even worse by lengthy checkpoint placement.
  • The last four chapters are an absolute nightmare, even on lower difficulties:
    • All of Chapter 19: The Settlement counts. You start out unarmed, and each segment has tons of enemies shooting at you from every possible angle. It borders on straight-up Bullet Hell at times.
    • Chapter 20: Caravan starts with a Car Chase Shootout and ends with a regular battle. While the former is generally managable, the latter is much harder due to an ongoing sandstorm, which makes it easier for enemies to sneak-attack Nate and Sully.
    • Chapter 21: The Atlantis of the Sands is a strong contender for the hardest level in the Uncharted series. This nightmarishly surreal place is swarming with Djinn-possessed militiamen who can tank a whole clip's worth of ammo, Teleport Spam wherever they please, and shoot fireballs as powerful as a hand grenade. Unquestionably the worst part is a fountain courtyard near the end, which is complete and utter hell regardless of your actions or the difficulty setting.
    • The 22nd and final chapter, The Dreamers of the Day, is comparatively easier than the preceding ones, but Nate accidentally causing the entire city of Ubar to collapse makes for some very precarious platforming. Then there's the Final Boss fight with Talbot, which can be tough if you haven't memorized the button prompts.
• The "UFO Catcher" side mission in Yakuza. Yes, it's entirely optional, and the reward for beating it (a step towards 100% completion and a decent weapon) isn't crucial, but having to use a crane game to pick up a whole bunch of stuffed animals is the epitome of tedium. Tedium then turns to rage as the loop of stupid, tinny, "cheerful" music bores into your brain, the annoying depth perception issues keep you from getting a bead on your target, the wonky physics engine causes the toy to fall out of the claw as it's moving towards the redemption chute, and the claw itself takes an excruciatingly long time just to move back to the starting point and reset itself. Thankfully, Kiwami alters the physics of the UFO Catcher such that it's much harder for a toy to fall out of the claw.
• Zombies Ate My Neighbors has several. Not levels, but level types:
  • The water levels (Look Who's Coming To Dinner, Creatures Of The Blue Lagoon, etc,) after level 18 is when The Fishmen start getting fast, able to catch Zeke/Julie easily when they swim, and NO, you can't use weapons while swimming. And The Fishmen can kill The Pool Guy, with ease.
  • Levels with only one victim to save. This turns the level into a savage game of tug-a-war between Timed Mission and Luck-Based Mission, since if that victim happens to die it's an instant game over and it's not only possible but likely that an enemy will happen to kill them before you get there even if you make a beeline toward them the second the level begins. Worse, is that since the number of victims in a stage depends on how many you saved in the last one (letting two die in the last level means the next one has two less victims to save), it's entirely possible to have to deal with the water levels above with only one victim to save. While you can reset the number of victims to save by loading from a password, this also costs you all of your weapons and items save for the starting level load-out of 300 water pistol shots, 2 first-aid kits, and 5 decoys. Pick your poison.
  • And for a specific level, look no further than Level 12: Mars Needs Cheerleaders. It's filled to the brim with Goddamn Bats, the fast-moving martains that can stop you in your tracks, football players that knock you all around, and a the martain ufo, which can only be killed by lobbing soda in a VERY specific weak point.

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