20 Video Game Hard Modes For True Masochists

The feel of a game can change drastically depending on what difficulty settings you're playing on. It can be a casual experience that makes you feel like a god or a challenge that pushes you to your limits.

If you're a fan of the latter category, you probably prefer to play on harder difficulty settings. However, even veterans of high difficulties can only take so much suffering, and there are some game modes out there that cross that line.

... And then go even further beyond.

Every now and then, developers will come up with difficulty challenges that are so brutal, so ruthless, and so ridiculously unfair that it takes only a true masochist to enjoy them. The challenge is not as simple as just making the enemies into bullet sponges. The game will also add especially unfair conditions, such as a permadeath mode, making you die in one hit, or showering your character with debilitating debuffs the longer you play.

The challenge of these game modes doesn't only take skill but also plenty of patience and determination (and sometimes luck) to bear their absolutely painful settings.

Unless you're a fan of self-torture, you probably didn't beat the following game modes. They're just too annoyingly difficult.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus follows the tradition of its predecessors by giving the player a wide variety of different difficulty settings. There are seven difficulty modes in total, and the final secret one, “Mein Leben,” is the absolute stuff of nightmares.

“I Am Death Incarnate” is the highest available difficulty by default and is considered to be one of the most challenging hard modes, not just in the New Colossus, but also among other first-person shooters released in the past decade. The enemies take dozens of bullets to kill each, and certain sections are slightly altered to make them even more difficult to survive.

Now imagine this, but give the player only one life while also disabling saving, and you end up with Mein Leben difficulty.

Yes, this special game mode, unlocked by finishing the New Colossus at least once, puts you on the highest difficulty setting possible and then tells you to finish it without dying once and while having no way of creating backup save files.

If I Am Death Incarnate can make people rage quit even at the early stages of the game, it goes without saying that the same experience with no reloading would give you free admission to a mental asylum.