That One Level / Stealth-Based Game

• Hitman 2: Silent Assassin has a level called Hidden Valley, where the sole objective is to get from one end of a valley to the other, evading swarms of ninja guards. This isn't actually all that hard in itself. However, the highly trained ninjas apparently do not have the slightest understanding of basic road safety and have a habit of getting themselves run over by the truck convoys going through the underground tunnel. This would invariably result in the body being discovered and the alarm being raised, ruining the player's chances of getting the top mission ranking of Silent Assassin through no fault of their own. This would happen about four times out of five and could happen at any point in the mission, even when you were just seconds from reaching the exit. The only solution was to just keep trying again and again and hoping you got lucky.
  • The Motorcade Interception mission of Hitman 2 is an exercise in hair-pulling because of the way the civilians are handled. Their starting positions and walking routes are randomized, and they run to get the nearest guard immediately if they see you with a weapon. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that without a weapon, they don't even notice you exist. Unfortunately, this is a sniping mission, so you have to carry a rifle from either the start of the level or your contact elsewhere to the nest. AND you're liable to get noticed while you're waiting in the nest for the motorcade to pass by, AND it's quite possible to go through all of this and then miss the shot anyway. This is especially annoying if you're trying for Silent Assassin rating.
• The Hitman (2016) version of "Freedom Fighters". All the NPCs, excluding the targets and hackers, are armed to the teeth (even the on-site chef!), there are 4 targets (Sean Rose, Maya Parvati, Penelope Graves, and Ezra Berg) who are spaced out in specific parts of the map, which would be fine on its own, if it were not for the fact the map is branded a Hostile Area in your suit, meaning SA/SO runs became an exercise in patience running from one part of the compound to the other, narrowly avoiding guards with makeshift cover. Making things worse, the game forced you to break into the basement of the farmhouse to leave, meaning you were funnelled into one place. Note that the GOTY Update for 2016 changed the level exit problem so that this was only enforced for the first playthrough, and the whole level got overhauled in Hitman 2 (and by extension Hitman 3) to add stealth grass everywhere to make navigating in the suit much easier, negating a lot of the issues people had with the map, especially in SA/SO runs, which now feels like a beatable challenge.
• Metal Gear series:
  • Building 2 in Metal Gear was a pretty creative, if difficult, level in itself, with various types of gameplay depending on what floor you're in (straight-up stealth, running away from pursuers, shooting, a maze, and so on), but was ruined by one piece of bad level design which makes the whole thing like pulling teeth. This is that one of the elevators will only go up, and the other elevator will only go down. It doesn't help that the radio gets jammed, so you can't even send or receive calls until getting antenna.
  • There's a lot of hate for the passageway between the Zanzibar Building and the Tower Building in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. First of all, the obstacles range from boring, to annoying, to boring and annoying. It doesn't help that the boss in the area is the Running Man, who is also really boring - you don't even get to shoot him, and you beat him by running in a circle quickly enough to lay mines before your O2 meter runs out.
  • The very insanely, long stairway in the communications tower of Metal Gear Solid. You CAN'T avoid getting spotted by a security camera, even when the "Throw a chaff grenade before entering new doors" worked before, forcing Snake to run up an insanely long flight of stairs, being chased by a shitload of enemies—in a game where it's usually suicide to take on more then three or four enemies at a time. Oh yes, there's also the Guide Dang It! that if you ran out of the room with the camera instead of rushing for the stairs, you're stuck in an infinitely respawning chamber with no way out (it's probably a glitch, but unwinnable until you reload). Even after mowing all the enemies down, the towers are still irritating for the insanely long time it takes to go up and down it, even when Snake's running.
    • Made even worse in the Gamecube remake, The Twin Snakes. Try making a "no kill" run while being chased up the stairs by an endless swarm of mooks. At least it averts Cutscene Incompetence by forcing you to go through an unavoidable laser detector instead of using chaff-proof cameras.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the worst part of the game is when Raiden gets his clothes taken away and has to sneak through Arsenal Gear while avoiding Arsenal Tengu (who are ten times more alert and dangerous than the Gurlukovich mercs).
    • That's nothing compared to the torture section after dealing with all twenty five MG Rays on the European Extreme difficulty, both the Tengus and MG Rays PALE in comparison to the sixty five second timer (no, this is not a joke) that you have to numb your button-mashing finger against for that VERY ANNOYING section. They thankfully nerfed this in the rereleases, but MGS veterans never forget this section, for good reason...
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has Act 3, an Eastern European level that focuses on the player tailing a resistance member. Instead of a normal sneaking mission, it plays like an Escort Mission where the escortee will run away and spend a good while hiding if he sees the player but will gladly approach any PMCs just to make sure the player stays busy. The resistance member tends to take a strange route in any case, and will resort to backtracking or running in circles if disturbed by anything. The entire process is going to take a while.
    • Averted if you use any of the masks other than Young Snake with the civilian outfit. The resistance members won't regard Snake as hostile, and if you let any of the PMCs pat you down without weapons equipped, they'll ignore you as well, which makes that part of the level loads easier.
    • While the aforementioned escort segment is frustrating, on The Boss Extreme it pales in comparison to the bike chase that follows it — especially when going for a no-kill Big Boss Emblem run. It requires an absurd combination of precision, memorization, timing, and luck.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes has one side-mission that pretty much stands above them all in terms of sheer difficulty and that is the "Destroy the Anti-Air Emplacements" mission. At the beginning, it starts with the normal phase, but right as you walk further through the map or wait a few moments Miller triggers an announcement to you that results in a permanent Caution Phase throughout the mission, and while it isn't too taxing on Normal difficulty, on Hard difficulty it gets amped up to absurd levels with the addition of the aforementioned perma-caution. Enemy soldiers can practically spot you from a ludicrous range, even when crouch-walking which fortunately normally just makes them suspicious-spot you, but that's still from a fairly far distance as they can easily "!" spot you even when crouch-walking due to their increased sight range coupled with the perma-caution, so throughout most of the mission you'll be crawling/rolling to avoid triggering the Alert Phase. If that wasn't enough, even after eliminating three Anti-Air Emplacements you're suddenly given the additional task of eliminating a fully-functioning autocannon-equipped APC vehicle before you can leave the area so if you don't have enough C4 to either set up a potent-enough trap to destroy it or enough recoilless rifle rounds to finish it off after triggering the trap then you'll have to do it all over again when attempting to S-Rank the mission, which is a gargantuan pain in the ass and you'll most likely have to extract all prisoners, including the one held deep in the Admin Building interior where Paz is located during the main story mission, which can spell doom for the slightest error if an enemy soldier around the tight-knit corners manages to successfully spot you and trigger the Alert Phase. All-in-all, it's the most potent test of hair-pulling frustration in this chapter when attempting to S-Rank it on Hard difficulty, for damn good reason.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has a few.
  • Mission 16. You have to extract a truck from a convoy. Sounds pretty simple. With two armored vehicles protecting it, plus an escort jeep. Still not too bad. But sneak around the vehicles or reach the target before they arrive? The Skulls show up the moment you get close to the truck. Their attacks can easily ruin your Fulton extraction attempts, and they will not hesitate to smash and shoot up their own truck trying to reach you, resulting in mission failure. And even if you do manage to Fulton the truck out, have fun dealing with them or escaping from what you thought would be just a quick mission involving a couple of vehicles.
  • Mission 45. You have to go to Afghanistan to retrieve Quiet after she leaves your base and is captured by the Soviet soldiers. Normally you'd think this would be a mission that would emphasize stealth and equip yourself accordingly. You'd be completely wrong. Instead you get hit by wave after wave of soldiers, gunships, and tanks, while being equipped with a weak Grom the game forces on you, forced to survive long enough for supplies to be dropped in. And if you didn't bother researching more powerful weapons and body armor? The game won't let you quit and start over from your ACC to do so, not unless you fulton yourself out on top of a container, which is neither easy to do under those circumstances nor something the game makes clear to you. It becomes a bit easier if you have forewarning and the right equipment, but you'll still have to face those waves of increasingly accurate armor.
• Thief had "The Haunted Cathedral". You're exploring ruins of an abandoned section of town filled with irritating undead, and any valuables worth stealing are very well hidden and difficult to find. You're likely to finish the main objectives within twenty minutes, and then spend the next hour or two searching every nook and cranny of the quite large level for enough loot to trigger the end, while constantly having to deal with zombies (which are not nearly as fun to work around as human guards). In general, any level in which you're dodging undead tends to be annoying, but at least loot is generally easier to find in them.
• Second Sight has Entrapped. Part Sewer level, part Escort Mission, all painful, especially if you are trying to do it stealthily and with no kills. Checkpoints are few and far between, the enemies are heavily armed soldiers that come in large groups and tend to spawn in behind you, the level is linear with very few hiding spots and full of water puddles that will make you leave footprints and give away your position if you are invisible, and you have to escort Jayne the whole way through, who, unlike the other escorts in the game, is completely unarmed. At least she doesn't have to be calmed down every time she is saved, unlike the previous escort mission with her.
• Splinter Cell series:
  • Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow has Jerusalem. For most of the level, you aren't allowed to be seen or kill anybody AT ALL. If a civilian or police officer so much as catches a glimpse of you, it's a instant game over, and the level is also full of light sources which make getting through it a nightmare. Even once you get to the part where you are allowed to be seen and kill enemies, three of them are waiting right outside the elevator for you as soon it opens and will quickly ventilate you if you don't knock out or kill them immediately. Even once you get past that, depending on if you kill Dahlia or not, you have to deal with either snipers who can kill you in 2 or 3 hits and alert very quickly, or more police officers you aren't allowed to kill or be seen by.
  • Pandora Tomorrow also has the following level, Kundang Camp. It starts out in the daytime, which naturally makes it much harder to remain unnoticed. It doesn't help that the vast majority of the level is spent outdoors in wide-open areas with sparse cover, placed in such a way that you have to be perfect with how you time your movements between the shadows. No less than two minutes after the level begins, you're also faced with a section where you must use your thermal vision to navigate around incredibly fine tripwires hidden by the grass that are hooked up to instant-kill landmines, while simultaneously avoiding more guards. Then the entire second section of the level has you following the Big Bad all over a mazelike compound, and like Jerusalem, you're not allowed to be seen by anyone. The level seems to get easier once you head into an underground bunker, but once you get back outside it ratchets back up again as you are faced with more wide-open areas, now with lasers all over the place. On top of all that, the level goes on for an eternity, with checkpoints few and far between, so any mistake is liable to make you re-do up to five or ten minutes of gameplay.
  • The third part of the penultimate level of Chaos Theory, the Bathhouse, is particularly difficult, even when compared to the rest of that level. The entire level has a confusing layout with well-lit rooms connected by narrow hallways, but as soon as Shetland and the ISDF betray each other, the level gets much harder, as he's accompanied by Elite Mooks with thermal vision goggles that renders stealth pretty much useless around them. At first, they're occupied enough to bypass them, but you eventually come across a room full of them and you cannot sneak around them - and while you could just run past them instead, there's a wall mine that'll kill you if you rush through the hall you have to go through - but you can't slow down either, or else the mooks will shoot you in the back. After this exchange, there's a Timed Mission with bombs you have to defuse. They're difficult to find, and after you've finished that, there's more Elite Mooks to fight.
  • The level immediately preceding the above, Seoul, is no slouch either. The entire level takes place in a warzone, meaning that all the enemies are automatically on high alert and will start shooting if they so much as see your shadow, and there is no alert music, so you won't know when they've seen you until they are actively shooting you. The first part of the level is actually fairly easy, but then it pulls a Bait-and-Switch and unexpectedly segues into a whole second part. Here you are introduced to UAVs, floating death machines with chainguns which are likely to blindside a first-time player, though mercifully they're not that hard to avoid - destroying them outright requires precision aiming, but they fly in easily-predictable fixed patterns and can be temporarily disabled with your OCP attachment. The level gets really hard once you run into soldiers shooting each other across a street, with the enemy side boasting a tank with a machine gun that can snipe you from a mile away, and sneaking along the ledges to the other end of the street without being noticed by it seems to be a Luck-Based Mission. Furthermore, the only way to permanently disable them and complete a bonus objective for doing so is to chuck a frag grenade down the gunner's hatch, which requires a surprising amount of accuracy and is likely to provoke at least one reload, though fortunately you don't have to disable them - yes, them. There's another one right at the very end.
  • The PC/360/PS3 version of Double Agent has the Sea of Okhotsk, especially when going for 100% stealth. Even though you are in a blizzard and can barely see anything five feet in front of you, due to the the enemy AI not factoring in the blizzard, it acts as if you are running around in broad daylight and so the enemies can see you at ranges you can barely even see them at, if you can see them at all. One objective requires you to hack and activate a brightly lit detonator in the middle of a camp to open the way up to the next portion of the level, and another forces you to knock out or kill a certain amount of enemies once you get aboard the ship. Also, once you get to the Captain and have to knock him out or kill him, he wanders around with a flare on a metal catwalk above a ton of oil and tends to turn suddenly, and you have to grab him from behind without making him even so much as suspicious. If he catches even a glimpse of you or you eliminate him without grabbing him from behind, he will throw the flare into the oil and kill you instantly in a huge explosion.
  • The same game also has its own penultimate level, Kinshasa. The first section of the level at the hotel is doable if challenging, but once that's done you leave the hotel and enter the warzones outside. The rest of the mission plays out like a rehash of Seoul mentioned above, except it takes place in broad daylight and nearly every part of the level is mired in heavy fighting, forcing you to rush from cover to cover - and specifically-placed cover at that - lest you get slapped in the face by an enemy that just ran in from out of nowhere. You can skip a fair amount by hitching a ride on an army truck, but the game gives no indication you can actually do that. Then you wind up in a government camp where going completely unnoticed is pretty much impossible. Finally, if you choose to save Hisham rather than shoot him, you have to slog through another section of the level that you would have skipped otherwise - and saving Hisham is mandatory if you want the Golden Ending but are running low on NSA trust or you blew up the cruise ship in the last mission.
  • The Gamecube/Wii/PS2/Xbox version of Double Agent has JBA HQ Part 2. Most of the mission consists of exploring a bunker full of narrow, well-lit tunnels with guards patrolling through them. This is already tough enough to get through, but the Red Mercury room in the Xbox version is by far the hardest part of the game to do 100% stealth. There are two guards patrolling the room in really tight patterns, one in Emile's office, which you have to sneak into, is well lit, and the cabinet is against the window which the other guard can see you through, and another on the ground level who sometimes go up a left ramp. You have to get a sample of Red Mercury from the center of the room, which requires first either hacking the keypad or using a password from the computers up the left ramp, then actually going up to it and scanning it. The problem? The ENTIRE CENTER OF THE ROOM IS FULLY LIT WITH NO COVER EXCEPT A THIN CABINET ON THE LEFT SIDE and the scanning takes a good 7 seconds to do, during which you are standing still and are fully exposed to the two guards in the room, and you have to quickly escape the room through an air vent on the right side as the front door closes and the room fills with gas. If you don't have the reflexes and timing of a god, you WILL get seen there. And it's not over after that if you are going for the good ending, as you'll have to defuse two bombs under a time limit. The one on the roof is easy to deal with, but the one in the docks has 4 guards patrolling the area who get suspicious really quickly, and the area is rather well lit and has some security cameras to deal with. Also, chances are that after you defuse the first bomb, your NSA trust will go completely to the right and will force you to report to Emile at the beginning of the level, wasting some of the precious time on the bomb timer. Good luck beating this mission with nobody knocked out.
  • Blacklist has Swiss Embassy, Charlie's second mission. Unlike the other Charlie missions which are at least decently large, open and have some good hiding spots, Swiss Embassy is small, linear, and has very few hiding spots, so enemies will quickly detect you. Enemies also tend to come in larger groups earlier in this mission than other Charlie missions, and the later waves are a absolute nightmare to get through, with Dogs and Heavy Infantry everywhere in small, well-lit and enclosed spaces, which even includes Heavy Infantry HVTs with riot shields. Even worse, the enemies tend to spawn on opposite sides of the map from each other in this mission, so if you want to get a mastery in the first five waves through comboing (Possible in each of Charlie's missions) before all the painful stuff comes in, you better have some good reflexes and luck.
• Tenchu 2:
  • There are two mandatory stealth missions, one with Ayame and one with Tatsumaru. While stealth is an important aspect of the series as a whole, a skilled player can still hack and slash their way through most levels. Not these ones : if a guard spots you, he will blow a whistle and it's an instant Game Over for you. Even if he notices you right as you bury your sword in their throat.
  • Tatsumaru's final mission: you are on a huge warship, and your objective is to kill every single enemy soldier aboard. Problem is, you have absolutely no way to know how many enemies there are, which means you will spend a lot of time running around looking for them, hoping with every throat sliced to finally see the next cutscene after the body drops. But that's not the end of it! Once the ship is cleared, you get to the Final Boss: a fully armored, Dual Wielding samurai who hits like a truck and has more health than every other final boss in the game. And if he kills you, you need to start the whole level over again! And since there is no way to restock on healing items once the level is started, hopefully you didn't get hit too much clearing out the enemy soldiers on the boat.

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