TYOA: 8 Great Video Games RUINED By Their Final Level

4. Meat Circus - Psychonauts

Video games don't get a whole lot more creative or original than Psychonauts - a wonderfully charming and infectiously weird platformer from the fine folk at Double Fine, albeit one that absolutely craters at the last hurdle.

The game's final level, the Meat Circus, fuses protagonist Razputin's young memories of the circus with Coach Oleander's childhood memories of a butcher shop into one aesthetically nauseating whole.

Sadly, though, the actual level design and gameplay can't live up to how fantastically gross it looks, because it combines a number of tricky mechanics seemingly designed solely to spike the player's blood pressure.

You've got an escort mission, extremely fiddly platforming, a time limit, and then a pain-in-the-ass boss fight, all of this resulting in a joyless enough experience that it swiftly erases all the fun had leading up to it.

At least Double Fine severely nerfed the difficulty for the Steam release, and as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the initial backlash, completing the mission unlocks an achievement called "I Thought That Was Unbeatable!" 

But anyone who played the O.G. version on consoles likely has a traumatic memory of slogging their way to the end - assuming they even bothered at all.