8 Beloved Video Game Levels That Have Aged Terribly

Unquestionably one of the most infamous levels in the Crash Bandicoot franchise, The High Road is a brain-breakingly difficult level which, while relatively short, requires players to navigate a treacherous series of rope bridges packed to the gills with life-ending dangers.

You need to leap across rickety planks of wood, avoid wild animals, and strategically use turtles to bounce forward, the sheer gruelling combination of which caused many players to lose their carefully hoarded collection of lives.

But it's also fair to say that The High Road had its fair share of fans, because in the 1990s, when hard-as-balls gaming was simply accepted as "part of the experience", it represented the ultimate challenge for Crash fans.

All the same, Naughty Dog shrewdly made the second and third games considerably easier to appeal to a wider market, and so for anyone who went back to the O.G. Crash years later, The High Road truly felt like a brutally unfair kick in the knackers by comparison.

But things got truly strange with 2017's N. Sane Trilogy remake of the original trilogy, where The High Road was inexplicably even more difficult than in its original iteration, due to developers Vicarious Visions failing to tweak the level design to accommodate the refined controls.

Sure, the level still has its defenders, but played today, it's more an exasperating obligation you're required to get through than the bold challenge it felt like decades ago.