10 Stupidly Hard Video Games Clearly Made By Sadists

9. Simon The Sorcerer

Aha, bet you weren't expecting this one were you? In fact we'll be quite surprised if you've heard of the game at all, given how overshadowed by similar titles such as Broken Sword and Tales of Monkey Island caused it to fade into obscurity mere years after it came out. Simon the Sorcerer is a point-and-click adventure game of the nineties variety, meaning gameplay revolves mainly around pottering aimlessly about wondering what to do. You play a sarcastic teenager called Simon who is transported into a fantastical world of dwarves, dragons, archaeologists, and have to stop an evil wizard because y'know, reasons. Doing this can be achieved exclusively by rubbing things on other things, or occasional rubbing things on people and having conversations. For younger readers think of The Walking Dead game (the good one), but without the sense of logic or being able to influence how the plot turns out. The reason Simon the Sorcerer is such a difficult game is that the solutions to all the problems in it are so damn surreal, meaning nine times out of ten you can only progress via guesswork. Now, that doesn't sound too bad, yet when you have twenty items and thousands of things to rub them on the game can get pretty bleemin' hard, especially when there's no guarantee you haven't missed an item somewhere, meaning you might to spend 20 hours rubbing your items on everything in the game and get absolutely no results. An example of this that always stuck in my mind is a section where you need to get into a castle, yet there seems to be no way to make that happen. After being stuck for about four weeks I discovered a rock that was identical to all the none interactive rocks making up the floor, which it is possible to pick up and find a note underneath needed to carry on the game. I found this by swinging the mouse wildly around the screen, desperate to see if it picked up a hidden object, and I'd been doing this in multiple areas for about 6 hours before I found the damn rock. This, alongside frankly mind-blowingly silly solutions to problems (e.g. having to fill an oboe with a watermelon), is why the game makes our list. Either the developers are insane or they enjoy making people scream at computer screens in frustration, but whichever it is they must have at least a streak of sadism to put out a product like this.