Dark Souls being Nintendo Hard has quite a few painful levels. Prepare to Die a lot.
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Dark Souls I
- Lower Undead Burg is very short, but you'll quickly grow to hate every second that you're there. The only enemies are Demonic Spiders, and at the very end is That One Boss the Capra Demon. What makes it especially frustrating is that unlike most other runs to aggravating bosses, you can't just run past everyone and have to stop and kill everything in front of you to avoid getting surrounded and killed, driving the time between refights way up.
- However, if you started with the Master Key, you can take a shortcut by heading to the entrance to New Londo Ruins (accessible from Firelink Shrine) and opening the door to the Valley of Drakes, at which point you can cross the bridge and enter a cave leading to Blighttown, allowing a player to skip over the Lower Undead Burg and the Depths, thus making the task of traversing the Lower Undead Burg optional. You will, however, have to face some blighted ogres along the way, so be careful!
- Blighttown is pretty much the point where players either become masters or give up. Enemies with attacks that go through your block (either poison or grab attacks), snipers that silently inflict Toxic on you without so much as a hit flinch (so you might not realize what's making you Toxic), clustered enemies that quickly swarm you, including the torch Hollows, and a narrow maze of walkways without Edge Gravity (to make dodging suicidal). There's also some Fake Difficulty involved, most notably the fact that the size of the level tends to cause massive slowdown on the console versions. The only small consolation is that Artificial Stupidity seems to kick in strong here, as the enemies' pathfinding AI seems to have trouble with the walkways and will constantly hurl themselves to their deaths. You also have to time your jumps carefully as a single mis-step will plunge you to your death.
- New Londo Ruins can be very annoying. For one thing, there are no bonfires in it anywhere, so if you die, you're going to have to do some trekking to get back to it. For another, most of the enemies are ghosts and are completely invulnerable (and unblockable) unless you are either using a cursed weapon (extremely rare), or are currently cursed yourself (which halves your HP). The only way to reliably progress is to use a Transient Curse, an item that temporarily curses you with no downsides, but it tends to wear off with no warning in the middle of a pack of ghosts. And the lower area is filled with Darkwraiths, powerful swordsmen who are capable of draining your humanity away from you.
- While the difficulty can be mitigated by ranged classes, Sen's Fortress is one of the most frustrating parts of the game and a massive wake-up call to players who get too comfortable. The Snake Men are Demonic Spiders who will outrange most melee characters, drain your stamina like crazy, and can jump halfway across a room to reach you. Some of them shoot lightning at you from ledges you can't reach while you fight the melee ones, and the very narrow ledges and corridors mean you rarely get to circle around behind them and have to fight them head-on. Some Snake Men will even meet you on the ledges to kill you, and their lightning bolts will knock you into the pendulums that can throw you to the lower levels, at which point you either take the nearby staircase or die, again. Not to mention all the swinging pendulums you have to dodge while fighting, a few hard to spot arrow traps, and the first appearance of a mimic chest which if you don't know how to spot will instantly kill you without warning. Oh, and if you fall off a ledge you're dropped into a tar-filled pit swarming with Titanite Demons, although they don't respawn if you manage to kill them. And that's only if you fall off a lower ledge. If you go up a narrow ledge anywhere above the first floor and be careless about how you are approaching the swinging pendulums (which seem to narrow the distance between them every subsequent floor), be ready to trek through the fortress again. And as the only bonfire in Sen's Fortress is rather hard to reach (it is accessible if you have already gone through the interior of the fortress and you have to know where to look), a slight mis-step is extremely frustrating even in the 'safe' upper levels, with even more narrower ledges.
- Another infamous section of the game is the Anor Londo Archers. Yes, even though they're a semi-common enemy in Anor Londo, those two deserve the capital letters, and everyone who's played the game knows exactly which two are being spoken of. They're perched on a ledge on the other end of an enormous bridge, armed with Dragonslayer Bows that deal huge Knockback. Even if you get across the bridge, which has guardrails, you have to fight them on the ledge, which does not. They're even on opposite sides of the bridge, meaning you have to put your back to one to fight the other. It's so hard that the easiest way to handle it involves messing with the AI of the Silver Knights to make one of them walk off a ledge.
- The Catacombs. For starters, it's packed with skeletons that will endlessly reassemble themselves until you find and kill the enemy that's resurrecting them. Even when you take care of all that, it's still full of frustrating enemies, pitfalls, and Skeleton Wheels, which are some of the most dangerous enemies in the game. Thankfully, this place is nowhere near as dangerous on NG+, which is why many players immediately go here after arriving at Firelink Shrine just to kill Pinwheel and obtain the Rite of Kindling. That said, for a new player who doesn't catch what's going on, this can be a bit of a deal-breaker right at the start; when people tell new players, "If you're fighting skeletons, you went the wrong way", this is what they mean.
- The Tomb of Giants. For starters, it's pitch-black and requires you to climb down sometimes narrow paths and one bad step means a fall to your death. That problem can be dealt with to an extent with the Skull Lantern (which is actually deep within the Tomb of Giants or requires killing every Necromancer in the previous area), the Sunlight Maggot (a piece of equipment from an out-of-the-way location in an area you may not have visited yet), or with the Cast Light spell (which is found in a rather obscure place). However, the place is still full of snipers who can fire giant and highly damaging arrows from far away in the darkness, giant skeleton warriors who hit hard and fast and will even try to mob you at one point, and feral giant skeletons who have a lunging physical attack that can knock off almost half the life of even a relatively high-leveled character before the player can even react.
- Lost Izalith is rightly infamous as the worst level in the game. It starts with many players being unable to see how to get in because of the way the bright lava affects visibility in the Centipede Demon's boss room. From there, the player must traverse a big lake of lava, which continues to negatively affect visibility, which they need to spend a ring slot to cross without burning to death (and even then, still stings and constantly drains their health), and which is absolutely infested with big crowds of deadly "Leaping Demons" that are actually just the bottom half of the zombie dragon repeatedly copy-pasted everywhere, and which can do a lot of damage on top of the damage they'll already be taking. The mid-level bonfire is hidden behind an invisible wall partway too. Once the lava is traversed, there's a relatively linear selection of corridors, culminating in having to fight an enemy pyromancer outside the boss room, possibly while also being invaded by Kirk. Oh, and you can accidentally ruin Siegmeyer's quest here, and the boss is considered a disappointment, if not the worst in the series. A shortcut that circumvents the lava portions of the level if you've gotten high enough in the Chaos Servant covenant mitigates some of these issues, but if the best thing you can say about a level is that you can skip most of it...
Dark Souls II
- The Shrine of Amana is generally considered one of the hardest, if not the hardest, areas of the game, especially if you're a melee user. It is a very large, open area covered mostly in water that slows your movement (and hides any Bottomless Pits). There are crawling enemies under the water that inflict Bleed, Archdrake clerics who tend to gang up on you and run very fast making it difficult to retreat from the fight to heal, and priestesses that constantly bombard you with magic from a distance (and are close enough together that you'll almost certainly never aggro just one). All capped off by... one of the easiest bosses in the game.
- The Gutter, due to being a combination of Blighttown (dodgy footing and a great many threats trying to poison you) and the Tomb of the Giants (pitch-black darkness with a few impossibly strong enemies), the two least popular areas from the first game. The follow-up area Black Gulch is also unpopular due to the constant poisoning, forcing you to spend a good few minutes trying to get rid of all the poison-spitting statues lying on the ground.
- Another painful area would be the Iron Keep. Powerful mobs that will require you to take them on one at a time, archers that can aim from far away to mess with your balance and push you off the edge and into a pool of lava, and health-consuming fiery contraptions that can only be deactivated near the end of the dungeon. If you don't know your way around the area, you might as well fight the Smelter Demon. By comparison, the boss at the end of the Iron Keep is a joke (although you will almost certainly die at least once to the "real boss", a.k.a. the small hole in his boss arena that is very easy to fall into while trying to dodge the boss's attacks).
- No-Man's Wharf is great fun, if being constantly swarmed to death in the dark by more zombie Vikings than you meet in every dungeon in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim sounds like fun. The layout is convoluted and inconvenient, the entire place is dark unless you have a Pharros Lockstone, of which there are very few in the early game (complete with insta-drown pits right next to the path), and the two main enemies you fight are both irritating: Varangians are fast-moving, high-damage undead Vikings with annoying attack combos who are fond of ganging up on you or engaging you in tight confines, and the ape-like Darkdwellers take a fair amount of killing and can inflict bleed with their attacks, which, while highly telegraphed, also have a long reach. On the bright side, you do get to meet an NPC who will actually buy your Shop Fodder! He'll relocate after, and you need to fight your way past seven Darkdwellers in a row to get to him.
- The Shaded Woods has a section in a deep fog full of murderous assassin ghosts. Without a very specific item, said ghosts are not only virtually invisible but also impossible to lock on to. When you get through that, you end up in an area full of hulking Lion Tribesmen who cause Curse, large jars that pump out gas that causes Curse, a giant non-respawning Basilisk that does not cause Curse but does cause Petrify, and a small corridor full of both regular Basilisks and acid pools that trash your equipment.
- The Frigid Outskirts, better known by its nickname Horsefuck Valley. A long run through a blizzard that obscures your vision even worse than in Silent Hill, where you'll constantly get rammed from all directions from the horselike Reindeer that will hit you before you can see them and take off a bunch of health. If you can somehow survive this chain of bullshit, you then have to cross a narrow bridge while fighting a lance wielding NPC who can very easily knock you off. Get through this and your reward is one of the most difficult boss battles in the game against Lud and Zallen, the King's Pets. Best part? Absolutely no bonfires the entire way through.
Dark Souls III
- Farron Keep, a poison-filled swamp which makes Blightown and the Valley of Defilement look like SugarBowls in comparison. Imagine a BIG poisonous swamp, filled with Demonic Spiders: feral beasts capable of one-shotting you, giant creatures armed with a tree and regularly releasing a homing magical attack, giant crabs, basilisks, darkwraiths, and a whole covenant of players dedicated to preventing you from reaching the Abyss Walkers. Also, slugs. Making it worse, the majority of the map is covered in swamp water that both slows you down and poisons you, and unlike in Blighttown, there's no item you can find that alleviates this.
- The Catacombs of Carthus, which can best be described as the bastardized, unholy offspring of The Catacombs and Sen's Fortress from Dark Souls. Lousy with traps, filled with tight corridors that will absolutely ruin any horizontal attacks and make dodging/camera work extremely difficult, and also home of the Skeleton Swordsmen, absolutely nightmarish Lightning Bruisers capable of teleport rolling a la the Old Hunter Bone quickstep from Bloodborne. To make an already lousy experience even worse, the Bonewheel Skeletons are back.
- The Cathedral of the Deep is where the proverbial gloves come off. The place is stonking massive and incredibly complex to navigate, forcing the player in and out and through all different pathways and routes. The place is also filled with traps and powerful enemies, and has just about every negative area feature in the series stacked onto one place- it's dark, it's filled with poison that slows you, and it tosses gank squads at you like nobodies business. While running Pyromancy can alleviate this, as many enemies inside the Cathedral are weak to fire and the cramped corridors make it easy to lob Fire Orbs downrange, it's still a massive pain in the ass.
- Irithyll of the Boreal Valley. Oozing with Scenery Porn aside, the standard mooks include acrobatic swordsmen that can and will stun-lock the shit out of you, Mad One style enemies that can and will mob the crap out of you (and can turn invisible at the drop of a hat), and Jester Thomas-like pyromancy knights that deal absurd amounts of fire damage. All these enemies come with absurd aggro ranges and devilish ambushes that put the Alonne Knights to shame. And to put the cherry on top of the pain cake, the boss of the area is Pontiff Sulyvahn.
- Irithyll Dungeon is hair-tearingly frustrating. The standard mooks of the level, the Jailers, can sap your health just by looking at you. Seriously, they reduce your life bar when they look at you, meaning you can't even heal the damage done until you kill them, and your bar recovers. The lower part of the Dungeon is filled with absurd enemy concentration, including around a dozen Jailers in the same room and some rather uncomfortable narrow ledges and corridors. Its follow-up area, the Profaned Capital, is also very unpopular; it houses some of the most annoying mobs in the game in the form of the Gargoyles and the Profaned Nobility, and it consists mostly of a Toxic-inducing swamp and a cathedral housing Monstrosities of Sin (which thankfully don't respawn). Fortunately, most of the Capital can be skipped, unless you want to finish Siegward's quest or free Karla to acquire some of the best pyromancies and dark miracles in the game.
- The Ringed City Swamp. While it doesn't poison you or slow you down, the layout of the swamp is such that you often run into multiple groups of enemies, ranging from the mostly straightforward but annoying to kill Locusts, to the almost a boss in difficulty Ringed Knights. It also has another Judicator Giant, meaning you can either try to skirt around his aggro range, or try to fight him and likely die if you can't get close enough and kill him. It also has a rematch with the Dragonslayer Armor, and while he isn't as hard as his boss fight, he's still a tough fight. Plus it looks visually boring, being just a dull color and the layout is just really big without much besides it. Oh and to get to the Swamp, you have to get past 5 Harald Knights, three of which are in the same spot.
