15 Most Brutally Hard Video Games Of The Generation (So Far)

13. Alien Isolation

A game whose challenge comes not from having to get your head around precisely what to do, but more steeling your resolve and patience against some incredibly cheap game mechanics.

See, besides actually being controlled by two A.I. brains at once, Alien Isolation has some of the most excruciatingly distanced checkpoints in gaming. Not only that, but as the Xenomorph will wander the halls of the Sevastopol almost at random, there's every chance you could make a break for a doorway only to get skewered from behind in seconds.

Die and you're back to the last save point, doomed to re-walk the same corridors, hear the same dialogue exchanges and watch the same cutscenes all over again. Compound this thought with a save animation that takes a good 15 seconds to activate - and might simply save you in a state about to be killed anyway - and you have something that worked as a horror, but mainly because the idea of losing the last hour's worth of progression was soul-destroying.