10 Stupidly Hard Video Games Clearly Made By Sadists

6. Dark Souls

Again this one is pretty obvious, so let's skip over it quickly. Dark Souls is a game where you play as a zombie (albeit a a rather flexible one) in a world where everything wants to and will kill you. There are brief periods where you can be human by doing something I can't remember, but this only lasts until the next time you die, so not very long.

The reason it makes our list is because of a boss called Sif, a gigantic Wolf that has an attack capable of breaking through your shield and killing you in one hit (unless you have incredibly high stamina). At a guess, it took me about 14 hours to beat the creature, including the time it took to farm myself to a high enough level where my stamina could withstand its attacks.

In all honesty the game isn't that difficult overall, it just has a few unpleasant sections that are a pain to push through. Curses are probably the biggest annoyance, as they reduce the player's health bar by half and can only be cured by walking twenty minutes through an area with invincible ghost enemies (though you can kill them if you happen to have a specific rare item). It took me about 80 hours to finish it completely, yet that number could have been lower if I hadn't been after trophies, so despite its reputation it is probably the easiest on our list. Dark Souls requires players to have balls of steel, providing some of the most challenging (and enjoyable) boss fights in the last generation. Every time you die it is because you did something wrong, your strategy was lacking or you weren't paying enough attention, which is a breath of fresh air when there are so many games like Revengeance around that kill you with crap physics. Saying that, the only reason it really makes our list is because of one or two sections, so we'd say the developers are more Mel Gibson than Marquis De Sade.