20 Video Games That Punish You For Being Too Skilled

For the old-school gamers, Gradius III is easily one of the most challenging bullet hells out there. The game is infamous for its high difficulty spikes and absolutely brutal levels, but what some of the people complaining about the challenge don’t realize is that most of the problems they have come from their own skills.

Gradius III doesn’t tell you this, being a game about a flying spaceship with no dialogue whatsoever, but the game features a hidden scaling mechanic that causes the stages to get exponentially harder the less damage you take.

If you continually beat stages without taking hits or dying, the enemies will hurl more projectiles at you and the bosses will get tougher. Considering the game came out in 1989, this kind of design is genuinely pretty impressive, but it's also something that a lot of people had no idea about.

These days, however, now that the secret is more well-known, professional speedrunners of the game actually let enemies hit them so that they don’t have as hard of a time beating the game in time.