Favorite Abusively Difficult Games

[GameBanshee News]

Tales of the Rampant Coyote has profiled several classic games that were fun despite being "abusively difficult."

The Bard's Tale

Okay, I'd forgotten about how horribly difficult this one was just to get started on. If you decided to create your own party - one without the bard's starting gear of a magic horn (am I remembering this correctly? Help me out here, guys... it's been a while), you ended up facing some kind of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" thing where the survivors of a dozen failed attempts to get through the first two hours of the game would end up getting together into some kind of "super-party" which actually had a prayer of making it through fifth level or something. Again, the details are sketchy, and I don't remember how easy it was to save or load games. But I imagine the overpowered default starting party came about as a result of playtesting, when the QA guys screamed bloody murder about how they would NEVER see the end of the game.

I remember spending a couple of hours just trying to find the Review Board so I could level my characters in The Bard's Tale. Once you had a few levels under each character's belt, the game started to become manageable. Until, of course, you had to start guessing Apport Arcane coordinates just to make it through all the darkness, trapped, and magic dead zones in some of the harder dungeons.

[fable]

It's one thing to have a flawed title like Bard's Tale, which incorrectly started new parties at a tremendous advantage. That could be managed, as you said. But that's categorically different from a game that deliberately sets out to be "abusively difficult," making the entire experience as unpleasant as possible--except to a handful of players who think it somehow reinforces their machismo to ram their heads endlessly into a wall. Good games don't do this anymore than they remove all puzzles and hand-hold players until they win. I don't think I'm the only player who ever realized that gameplay is usually designed to be difficult enough to provide shifting and reasonable challenges that the player surmounts.

Actually, I don't think the author mentions any abusively difficult games. Suspended, for example, was no more difficult than other word-parsed Infocom titles. On the other hand, Hitchhiker's Guide to he Galaxy was abusively difficult, because it deliberately set out to frustrate your attempts to use proper words to achieve anything. And then there was The Prisoner, where abusively difficult was part of its raison d'etre, since the ruler mirrored Number One's control--and you, being Number Six, the Prisoner, didn't know what they were. Brilliant in its own way.