This week sees the release of Saros, which naturally has me thinking about my time with Returnal, which is definitely the most challenging game I've played so far. My preference is to play games on easier difficulty settings because I play games for fun and I want to get the most out of my gaming time. I almost didn't get Returnal when I saw it didn't have difficulty settings, but I went through with it because I thought it looked really cool. My first playthrough was absolutely brutal lol. I died well over 100 times. I'm pretty sure everything killed me at least once (except the final boss, oddly enough). But I stuck with it and beat it.

I've replayed Returnal a couple times since then and have died less in each subsequent playthrough. So a lot of the challenge just came lack of muscle memory.

Honorable mention goes to Crash Bandicoot 4, specifically going for max completion. Those time trials made me want to pull my hair out.

What are some of the most challenging games you've played?

Oh man, some of the Crash levels were brutal! I tend to be the same way, which is why I never got into the Souls games or Ninja Gaiden. I'm cool with a challenge, but I don't want to keep hitting my head against a wall. I've heard good things about Saros, so I might give it a try.

One of my earliest memories is getting super frustrated with Spider-Man & X-Men: Arcade's Revenge. That game's die once and start over method paired with its not great mechanics made for a miserable time haha.

I'm a massive Souls-like and Metroidvania fan, so I played most of the games people put in hard games lists...

Yet, my pick is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. It took me 10-15 hours to finish a game that can be finished in 3 minutes.

When I game for fun, I often toggle down the difficulty because I don't want to be smashing controllers. But when I play for review I make sure to try out the different difficulty settings. And boy did I have a time playing through Hades 2 that way haha. I also have childhood memories of being absolutely befuddled by early Legend of Zelda games because the lack of direction could be brutal at times.

I'm going old-school on this one and choosing Battletoads, Ghosts-N-Goblins, and TMNT for the NES. I never won either of them.