If you ever strike up a conversation with a fellow gamer, chances are you'll only get a few lines in before you start talking about something that was intensely frustrating, annoying, or just straight up made you walk away from a title. Such things are commonplace, but have you ever been genuinely proud of yourself for besting a particularly arduous boss, sequence or level? It's one thing for developers to chuck all manner of bullets, spells and screen-encompassing hellspawn our way for the sake of 'difficulty', but some titles get their mechanics absolutely spot on, and it's up to us to master them and overcome. There's a fine line between frustrating and genuinely hard, and it all resigns in the design of certain levels. Take Max Payne 1's 'blood trail' level where you were stuck fumbling around in the dark; it was just needlessly annoying and cumbersome due to a lack of telegraphing where you were supposed to go. On the other hand when a game's mechanics fall totally into a place and you're at one with the game, gripping the controller tightly as the world around you fades away, that whole death screen-staring notion of "Well what was I supposed to do?!" turns into pure "Bring it on".