Back in the early days of gaming, games gave the consumer bang for their buck through intense and carefully planned difficulty. Games like Contra, Castlvania, and Mega Man only had a handful of levels to play inside those cartridges but you could get an easy thirty hours out of those games as you would be playing areas and levels over and over again until you finally figured out🤡 how to beat them. Many games in the early era of gaming didn't have the ability to save and only offered a small number o꧅f continues. If you didn't beat that final boss before you used up your allotted continues, it was back to the very beginning.

For those of us that were there at the beginning, the Internet wasn't available for instant walk-throughs or tips. Sometimes you played the game for months before you found it covered in Electronic Gaming Monthly or the legendary Nintendo Power.

Today's gamin💃g landscape is much different from decades past. Most games allow you a seemingly endless number of saves. Dying generally means starting back at your last safe point. This has more or less eliminated the idea of a "continue," at least, in the sense of the word all those years ago.

Games of the modern era also have a greater emphasis on story. Many games are very cinematic and the developers want you to see what they've created. It's not a matter of if you can beat a game, but when you beat it.

This isn't to say games today aren't hard. There's quite a few games tha🔯t many of us would deem "impossible" these days. The level of difficulty comes from other things like highly involved play and꧒ mechanics, and the increasingly popular "trial by death" play style. Let's take a look at fifteen games from the modern era that the casual gamer would claim to be "impossible."

15 ღ Dark Souls 3

There's no way anyone would dare create a list of this nature without mentioning a Dark Souls game. The series is known for its punishing level of difficulty, involved combat system,🦂 and the necessity to plot out your strategy by learning from 𓂃what will be many, many deaths.

Fans of the series can't seem to agree on which game in the franchise is the most difficult. Some say Dark Souls 2 is the easiest while some say Dark Souls 3 is easier than the second. Many fans say that Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3 have harder boss battles, while Dark Souls 2 has harder areas to traverse and clear.

Either way, the next to impossible level of difficulty in any of the Souls games makes accomplishing even the 🌊smalle𒊎st of tasks a very rewarding experience.

14 ♕ Robot Unicorn Attack ⭕

Robot Unicorn Attack was originally released on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim website. It's an "endless running" style game similar to (and predating) the infamous Flappy Bird. You're never going to truly "complete" Robot Unicorn Attack, but you do get a sense of accomplishment by setting your own points goals or finding yourself in a top 🌌spot on the leader board.

The game had over a mill🧸ion plays in its first week online and saw itself ported to the iPhone, Android, and Facebook. It spawned four different stylistically unique editions as well as a slightly less difficult sequel.

Another element🐭 to the game that adds to the difficulty is the endless loop of Erasure's "Always" that serves𒁃 as the game's soundtrack. That could test your patience.

13 💃 Bloodborne ♓

Developed by FromSoftware, the same folks that brought you the Demon Souls and Dark Souls games, Bloodborne follows in the same footsteps as its spiritual predecessors. Here we have another third person action roleplay series that sends your character through nearly impossible area content and puts you up against insanely difficult bosses. Some claim that Bloodborne isn't as punishing as the Dark Souls series, but 🥃having that argument with someone is about as productive as arguing Coke versus Pepsi.

The major difference between the two franchises is the setting. While Dark Souls takes place in a fantasy setting, Bloodborne takes place in a world that draws inspiration from t🌺he works of H.P. Lovecraft and a more Gothic Victorian era.

Gamers that are still waiting for a decent Cthulhu game should play this one ౠin the meantime.

12 Don't Starve 👍

The thing about the Don't Starve survival series is you're going to starve. You're going to starve a lot. You're going to get killed by monsters in the night. A lot. You will lose your sanity. A💟 lot. The early experiences in this game are so difficult it would easily turn off a more casual game player. Even long-time pla⭕yers have complained that updates have made the game too hard to be fun.

Like most survival games, perseverance꧑, learning about the world and its mechanics, hoarding resources, and learning "recipes," will eventually put you in a situation that makes the game feel less gruesome.

If you can find yourself playing this Burtonesque survivor for more than a few days without putting your mouse through your monitor, we salute yo🤡u.

11 🌠 Ark: Survival Evolved🐟

Ark: Survival Evolved is an extremely simple game if you're going the single player route. If you're playing in-house you'll be able to lengthen your amount of day-time, shorten the amount of night-time, greatly reduce the time it takes to tame a dinosaur, greatly boost the amount of resources you get from a single use of your tools, and exponentially increase the amount of XP you can get from performing some of the game's more mundane tasks. You're more or less playing an endless, glorified tutor꧂ial.

The challenge comes from the game's PVP servers - the style the developers intended us to play. Taming a dinosaur can take literal hours, constant vigilance, and ꦛcompletely drain your resources and patience. Resources take ages to gather and nights are cold and deadly. The game is "always on" and logging back on to find your early home completely destroyed, your resources wiped, and your dinosaur friends slaughtered is pretty much a guarantee.

You will need to find help from💝 other players or have the patience of a Saint.

10 𓆉 🔥 Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy could very well be one of the hardest games on this list, but it also might be the most fun. Whil꧙e the death animation is extremely simple, there is something about watching that little cube of meat explode that never seems to get old. Dying and losing in this g🌃ame is extremely entertaining and oddly satisfying. You don't find yourself getting so frustrated with each failure that you get to the point of wanting to destroy your gaming equipment - you find yourself laughing. And you're going to laugh. You're going to laugh many, many, many times.

The artistic direction of Super Meat Boy makes you think of the punishingly🥃 hard games of an era already past. Do things old school and invite some friends over to swap the controller when things get to be too much.

9 Deadly Premon💮ition 🔯

Many of us players are on the fence about this little piece of open-world survival horror. Some love it, while others hate it. Regardless of where you fall, you have to admit this game is almost impossible to play. The game is heavily inspired by the cult classic television series Twin Peaks. The references and similarities should be easily caught by fans of the soon-to-be returning series. While Deadly Premonition's source material is nothing short of fantastic, the game itself is a nearly impossible drudg🐼e.

Premonition isn't impossible because it's actually difficult, it's impossible because🐼 elements of the gameplay are so bad you just wanna stop and play almost anything else.

To solve the games mysteries you have to visit certain people at certain times in the day. What someone may tell you at night could be different than what♔ they tell you during the day, so you have to catch them more than once. 𓆏Visiting these people is a major chore as the driving mechanics could very well be the worst I've ever seen. This makes advancing, even on Easy Mode, quite a challenge.

Playing on PC? Now we're really talking "impossible." Steam users report that the game constantly🌱 crashes - to the point where many just gave up even trying to play. The only fix seems to be a fan-made update.

8 💃 Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 🧸

It's a shame that the Tony Hawk series took such a nose dive. The first handful of games, especially the first installment in the Underground spin-off, were absolute gems. Like Deadly Premonition, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 was impossible not because developers intentionally brought a new level of challenge to the series, but because it was rushed through development. Your ability to conquer Tony Hawk 5 isn't held in check by the return oꦡf a new and improved Eric Sparrow, but by broken mechanics and an unfinished game.

There were tons of glitches, collision issues (a big problem in a game where you are in constant interaction with your environment), and the online aspect of the game create🎐d a number of lag issues.

The online element makes the game impossible to play𒈔 if your internet is out or you live in a rural area with no internet availab༒ility. The $60 disc came with what can only be described as a tutorial and the rest of the game had to be downloaded as an "update" since it wasn't finished at launch. Some players may have found themselves completely unable to play.

7 Ninja Gaiden Sigm💙a 🀅

Ninja Gaiden has a long legacy of being one of the hardest franchises out there. This legacy goes all the way back to the 1980s with the first installment in the series for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. How many people do you know that made it past the third level before launching the console through a window? Ninja Gaiden: Sigma on💟 the last🌠 generation of consoles is no slouch when it comes to keeping up with said legacy.

Some might blame the impossibility of beating the originals on poor level design and some mechanics that some might deem unfair (like the bounce-back when you're hit), but Sigma just offers a good challenge, similar to that of Dark Souls. Yes, it's hard. Yes, a casual player is probably going to put it down. Keep at it though and you'll have a highly entertaining﷽ and rewarding experience.

6 🧸 Megꦏa Man 9

The Mega Man series is renowned for being a punishingly difficult but thoroughly entertaining experience. Fans of the series like it because it's next to impossible to complete any of the installments in the long running franchise. Only the most hardcore Mega Man fans can claim to have beaten one of the games and most of us will name Mega Man 2 as the game we conquered. Because the games are known and revered for their difficulty, developers decided to stay true to form when reviving the franchise with Mega Man 9.

Unfortunately, they succeeded in making the most impossible Mega Man to date. Many areas were hard for the sake of being hard. It lacked a certain fairness to its difficu💛lty that most of the games on this list have. The point was missed on this first attempt at making a retro-style revival.

Luckily, Mega Man 10 ಌcleaned up this slight issue and fans were given the game they deserved.