10 Gruelling Video Game Levels That Were Just The Beginning

8. Forest Follies - Cuphead

Dark Souls Opening
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Cuphead prides itself on being one of the hardest games of the 2010s, and considering its steep competition for that title, that's saying a lot. So, it stands to reason that Cuphead kicks your ass six ways from Sunday right off the bat.

Forest Follies, while giving you a much better tutorial than the other games on this list, is still soul crushingly hard, with your tiny amount of life being offset by enemies and projectiles coming out of every nook and cranny of the screen, and you being armed with a measly little water gun and a jump parry that only works on pink objects and that you ARE going to screw up the first few times you use it.

Needless to say, people die a lot on this level, possibly even more than the others due to first time players not being as experienced with the controls yet. Oh, and just to rub salt in the wound, this is also where you become acquainted with Cuphead's most infamous system - showing you your level/boss progression every time you die. Both to encourage you to try again, and just to humiliate you when you see how far you still had to go.

And of course, once you finish it and make it to the world map, you see that you are MAYBE 1% done with the game after all of that.

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John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?