We don't talk about God of War's Path of Hades level for a REASON. #godofwar #gaming
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00:00Video games can be beautiful, exciting, and mind-expanding at the best of times.
00:04They can also be so hard, so infuriating, and so broken that they make us want to cry.
00:09As you probably gathered, this is not a list about the awe-inspiring moments that made us glad to be gamers,
00:15it's about those other times.
00:17Specifically, the levels in video games both great and not-so-great that made us want to tear our hair out
00:22for being either mechanically confounding, unreasonably difficult, or a combination of the two.
00:28I'm Jess from WhatCulture and here are 10 Confusing Video Game Levels We Never Want to Play Again.
00:34Number 10, Nightmare Blood Trail, Max Payne.
00:38While checking out a gameplay video of this one on YouTube, I found this top comment which read,
00:43and let me check,
00:44"...easily the worst part of any game I've ever had the displeasure of having to complete."
00:48And that's just too good of a sentence not to share with you or to include on this list.
00:53Quite apart from being difficult to complete, these levels are horribly unsettling.
00:57If we're talking confusing levels, then the maze of long, dark corridors and painful blood tightrope
01:02that you'll need to navigate in Max's nightmare certainly qualifies.
01:06If you haven't played this one, basically Max has a nightmare about the night his wife and daughter died,
01:11and you get to play it! Yay!
01:14To get through the trickiest part of the level, you'll need to explore a pitch-black room,
01:18attempting to firstly not fall off, and subsequently jump between blood trails on the floor
01:23while listening to thumping music and a baby crying the entire time.
01:28It doesn't help that this isn't a precision platformer, and Max isn't exactly a gymnast.
01:33Fall off the blood trail and you're booted back to the beginning.
01:36What's more, this is actually an excellent game. It's just a purely horrible level.
01:40Whether it was the controls that broke your brain on this one, the terror,
01:44or your complete inability to figure out where you were supposed to be going,
01:47I think it's safe to say the vast majority of us never want to play this one again.
01:51Number 9. The Water Temple. The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time.
01:56I know, we had to do it. I'd argue this is the perfect list for The Water Temple to live on,
02:00because on reflection, it wasn't that hard.
02:04It was just that most of us played it as kids and probably sucked at games a lot more than we do now.
02:09What it was, however, is extraordinarily confusing.
02:12A labyrinth of corridors, hidden channels, rooms, numerous puzzles, and hidden switches,
02:17this was just too much for a lot of kids to figure out,
02:20and remains an exercise in frustration for most adults.
02:23Of course, it doesn't help that I can count on one hand the number of games
02:27where travelling through water doesn't suck, and Ocarina of Time does not make the cut.
02:31If the navigation wasn't complicated enough, there's also threatening spiky enemies to contend with,
02:36things that want to kill you in the water, where you can only attack with your hookshot,
02:40and specific locations to find so you can change the water level to achieve your goal,
02:45which requires an incredible level of outside-the-box thinking.
02:48I guess we're ultimately better gamers after having gotten through this one,
02:52but boy, does it make me hesitant to start another playthrough.
02:55Number 8. Rug Ride. Disney's Aladdin.
02:58Since we've covered painful water levels, we may as well give Fire a look in, too.
03:02And if your childhood wasn't marred by the pain of experiencing The Water Temple,
03:06I bet this one's gonna ring a bell.
03:08Disney's Aladdin was released in 1993 on the Sega Genesis and SNES,
03:13to the collective joy of Aladdin and video game fans everywhere.
03:16Interestingly, though, we're only talking about the Genesis version here,
03:20because the SNES version was a lot easier.
03:23This one must have seemed like an obvious buy for parents around Christmastime
03:26since it came out in November, and it's just the collision of a video game and one of Disney's best films.
03:32Makes sense, right?
03:33Except for the fact that they decided to make the game really freaking hard.
03:37One particular level, Rug Ride, had plenty of young players in tears
03:41as Aladdin on the magic carpet, trying to fly away from a very fast,
03:45very threatening lava surge in an inhumanely fast auto-scrolling level.
03:50This one hurt largely because the game is programmed with such a small window of success
03:55that you had to pull everything off pretty much perfectly, lest Aladdin be toasted to a crisp.
04:00Genie would give you blink-and-you'll-miss-it instructions of where to go next
04:04to avoid bumping into platforms as you go.
04:06And if you think you've made it, the jerk throws you a question mark at the end,
04:11so it's just luck as to whether you'll stumble at the last hurdle.
04:14As a result, a lot of players learned about cheat codes because of this game.
04:18Given anybody who played this one has probably already poured hours and hours of their life
04:22into trying to get through this level, I think it's safe to say we don't want to play it again.
04:27Number 7. The Library. Halo Combat Evolved.
04:30If there's one thing we can say in favor of the side-scrolling hellscape that is
04:34Aladdin's Rug Ride level, at least it's straightforward.
04:37Literally, you're just going straight, sometimes up and down, usually into a rock to your death.
04:42Not so of Halo's The Library level, where the fan-favorite FPS apparently decided to lose
04:47a few fans by featuring what is pretty universally acknowledged to be the worst level in the entire franchise.
04:53The Library is the seventh campaign level in Halo Combat Evolved.
04:57It requires you to fight your way through four gruelingly long and repetitive flood-riddled levels
05:02to ultimately reach the Index Chamber.
05:04Essentially, between how much you'll be getting lost and inevitably dying to the many waves of enemies,
05:09this is the part of Halo where a lot of players straight-up stopped having fun.
05:13The environments are boring, convoluted, and way too big, the enemies you're pointing your gun at
05:18are uninteresting, and if you try to run through it, you'll probably die
05:22and the whole thing will take you even longer.
05:24I really hope you like walking down hallways and riding elevators, because that's your life now.
05:29Even the developers themselves admitted that this level runs about half an hour longer than it should.
05:34Number six, The Path of Hades, God of War.
05:37It's been said this particular level requires patience and skill.
05:41If you don't have the latter, I hope you have the former in spades, because otherwise, this is gonna get ugly.
05:47Perhaps the most hated level in the whole God of War series is The Path of Hades.
05:51If I just unlocked a painful memory here, hit me up in the comments, we'll have some group therapy.
05:56Pun fully intended, this level can go to hell.
05:59Kratos is a tough dude, but even he has a real tough time climbing back out of Hades,
06:04as the path is riddled with infuriating platforming sections that you have to pull off with a fixed camera,
06:10loads of enemies to defeat, traps to evade, and a rotating wheel wall which has claimed many a gamer many a time.
06:17If the spinning cylindrical walkways don't get you, the blades sticking out of them will,
06:23and if you're able to get past that, you might get knocked off a floating platform by an enemy anyway.
06:28Just watching this level play out is anxiety-inducing.
06:31The level actually starts out chaotic and tricky, and then just keeps upping the ante until it's over.
06:37The difficulty of the puzzles and the foes you have to contend with on narrow platforms is so unbalanced,
06:42it deters fans from wanting to replay the full game itself,
06:46let alone how much they don't want to touch this one infuriating level.
06:505. The Black Pit's Battle – Divinity Original Sin 2
06:54Divinity Original Sin 2 may be the best RPG of this century, at least in this humble host's opinion,
07:00but it is a turn-based combat game, meaning that if you screw up in combat,
07:04you might not realise until you're 40 minutes in, and that's a lot of backtracking.
07:08To be fair, I think you'll have a worse time here if you're playing with unreliable co-op companions
07:13instead of controlling the action yourself, but no matter what,
07:17Black Pit's encounter is going to give you a hard time.
07:20It might not be a level in the traditional sense, but it's certainly a section we can firmly identify in the game,
07:25and then preferably cast out into the fires of hell, so I'm gonna allow it.
07:29Divinity Original Sin 2 is a classic old-school party-based RPG
07:33that requires careful tuning of your party makeup, equipment, abilities and tactics.
07:39Every move needs to be executed to perfection unless you're playing on a low difficulty,
07:43especially in this particular level, which will almost definitely result in everything being on fire.
07:49If you didn't spec into Hydrosophist with Losa, you're about to regret that very quickly,
07:54because there's not much you can do about all the propagating flames.
07:58To make things even more difficult, you need to keep an NPC alive and defeat a swarm of oil voidlings,
08:04which spawn out of the pits, and fire voidlings which heal as they move through the fire,
08:08which, as we discussed, is almost definitely covering the oil-laden battlefield.
08:13Also, the NPC does that painful NPC thing where he tries to help out,
08:17but his attacks are lightning-based, so, you guessed it, everything ends up on fire.
08:26Super Mario Galaxy is yet another fantastic game,
08:30but this particular level will have you putting it down longing to never return.
08:34Basically, everybody's favourite plumber is asked to distribute bombs around an area
08:38to take out a couple of dozen piles of garbage, which would definitely be doable
08:42if you weren't given 30 seconds to do it.
08:45On top of which, the bombs take about 10 full seconds to explode.
08:49Yeah, a third of the time you have to complete the entire challenge.
08:53So if you don't place them perfectly the first time, then you'll have to try again.
08:57And if you place them perfectly, but not within the last 10 seconds before the timer is up,
09:01they won't blow up in time for the cranky robot to tell you you're good to go.
09:05Even though he could just wait a couple more seconds,
09:07then the bombs would explode, then everything would be clean,
09:09we could take our style, go on our merry way.
09:11Stupid robot.
09:12If you do manage to get through this one and think you handled it okay,
09:16you'll have to do it again later as Luigi, and it's even harder.
09:19So that's fun.
09:24A little unconventional here, but I think enough people stop playing Amnesia at the prison level
09:28that it deserves a spot on this list.
09:30The entire game you've been terrorised by horrible looking creatures,
09:34gradually losing and recovering sanity,
09:36and managing to make a little progress along the way.
09:39Comparatively, the prison is so dark, so complicated, and so unsettling
09:43that it's become one of the great
09:45I do not want to be playing this level now nor do I ever want to play it again
09:49areas in gaming.
09:50This isn't because the game is bad, mind you,
09:53it's just this particular section is relentlessly terrifying
09:56while still calling on you to solve its environmental puzzles
09:59and navigate your way through.
10:01Sure, you could pull out your lantern or light up a torch,
10:04but at that point you may as well don a sign saying
10:06What's up, gatherers? Lunch is served.
10:08A part of you will certainly feel like you've come this far and better keep going,
10:12but the combo of your own fear, monsters roaming around,
10:15and the difficulty in figuring out where to go next
10:17is easily too much for a lot of players.
10:20I'm confused, I'm scared, and I don't want to play anymore.
10:23Number 2. Pulling down a Star Destroyer. The Force Unleashed.
10:27Pulling a Star Destroyer out of the sky with your Force powers
10:30doesn't seem like something you'd be able to do,
10:33and given the finicky controls of The Force Unleashed,
10:36it almost is something a ton of players weren't able to do.
10:39For those who pulled it off, I'm sure there's very few
10:41who are keen to dive back in for another go,
10:44of balancing their attempt to drag the enormous ship closer
10:47while attempting to not be blown up by the most TIE Fighters you've ever seen.
10:52Being told repeatedly to pull it out of the sky
10:54when you are indeed already trying to pull it out of the sky
10:57but also not die in the process is even more of a pain.
11:01Lay on top of that confusing UI instructions
11:03that seem to suggest you move the thumbsticks
11:05in a direction that won't actually achieve a Force pull,
11:08and you've got an A-plus recipe for a level we never, ever want to play again.
11:13Number 1. The Dam. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
11:17This one's an oldie but a goodie, and by goodie I mean baddie,
11:20as in this is one of the universally accepted toughest levels ever made for a video game.
11:25You've probably heard this one from us before,
11:27but there's a good reason as to why.
11:29Because TMNT is a cut above when it comes to creating levels
11:32that are brutally painful disasters,
11:34which somehow made it through the QA process.
11:37Particularly awful is the level The Dam,
11:40where players are forced to contend with an underwater maze
11:43complete with vast diminishing air supply,
11:45swarms of electric seaweed,
11:47and confounding level design.
11:49Add to that the fact that you're tasked with defusing 8 bombs
11:52in just 2 minutes and 20 seconds,
11:54plus there's next to no room for error,
11:56and this level has no redeeming qualities.
11:59After managing the brutal difficulty and maddening mechanics,
12:02if you did get to the end of this one
12:04and managed to see that OK pop up saying that you won it,
12:07there's no way you're looking back.
12:09That's it for our list, but do let me know down in that comment section
12:12if you can think of any other confusing video game levels
12:15that you never, ever want to play again.
12:17As always, I've been Jess from WhatCulture,
12:19thank you so much for hanging out with me.
12:21If you like, you can come say hi to me
12:23on my Twitter account where I'm at JessMcDonald,
12:25but make sure you stay tuned to us here
12:27for plenty more gaming goodness.