10 ULTRA Hard Video Game Opening Levels That Broke You
9. Prologue - Nier: Automata
Nier: Automata offers up one of the most unexpectedly challenging prologue sequences in recent video game history, in large part because there's no way to save until you've made it all the way to the Bunker section. That's at least 40 minutes of gameplay, including some infuriatingly unskippable cutscenes.
Even on Normal difficulty the prologue is surprisingly demanding, and if you're nutty enough to try it on Hard, you're in for a painful night.
You need to fight not one but two tricky bosses before getting to the end, ensuring that the opening serves as less of a calm tutorial than a demented trial-by-fire.
Nobody would blame you for just cheesing the prologue on Easy difficulty, because you can otherwise spend literally hours trying to make it through this thing.
While the rest of the game is hardly a picnic in of itself, it's at least more fairly balanced, and the ability to save isn't cruelly gated off from you.