[deleted]

[The Game Analists]

[deleted]

 

[moraes]

 

[octavius]

Might&Magic 1 and Wizardry 3 in the beginning.

 

[Rpgsaurus Rex]

Busin 0 for PS2. My characters keep dying on level 1 and I'm running out of money for rest/revive.

I guess it's my fault for not dodging the 'red' enemies, though. May restart.

 

[Courtier]

Elminage Gothic weeds out 90% of players in the first dungeon, progressively gets harder and culminates in a monstrous 20-level postgame dungeon where teleport is disabled and every single encounter can easily result in TPK. It is Wiz 1-5 refined to perfection and then taken a step further. Estimated time to beat the game 150-200 hours, Codexers that have beaten it can be counted on one hand

 

[Nyast]

Chaos Strikes Back ?

 

[Fowyr]

Chaos Strikes Back has its moments. Traps where you are surrounded by munchers and dead in ten seconds, that room with vexirk that blocks you under portcullis, so you are smashed very fast and so on.

 

[octavius]

Chaos Strikes Back has its moments. Traps where you are surrounded by munchers and dead in ten seconds, that room with vexirk that blocks you under portcullis, so you are smashed very fast and so on.

One of my fondest memories of CSB was the place where every time you passed a pit some munchers flowed up and started nibbling. After a while I got so tired of it that I jumped down the pit to exterminate the little buggers. I ended up in a room that was wall to wall muchers, and they munched up my party much faster that I could kill them.

 

[Pyreen]

Elminage Gothic weeds out 90% of players in the first dungeon, progressively gets harder and culminates in a monstrous 20-level postgame dungeon where teleport is disabled and every single encounter can easily result in TPK. It is Wiz 1-5 refined to perfection and then taken a step further. Estimated time to beat the game 150-200 hours, Codexers that have beaten it can be counted on one hand

Yeah but you can save wherever and how often you want incl. inside the dungeons, and encounters are balanced with that in mind. So those TPKs lose a lot of their sting.
By far the hardest and most unforgiving crawler Ive ever played is Wizardry 4, and by quite a large margin.

 

[Courtier]

100% agreed, Wiz4 takes the cake. Though you could also save anywhere in W4. In both games, saving and reloading respawns the guardians/fixed encounters. But playing 4 is more of an exercise in solving the dungeon as though it were a giant puzzle and experiencing Werdna's bizarre journey, it's not something you play for the same reasons as any other blobber (set MC, no character creation, no traditional leveling, loot plays a minor role, highly puzzle-based, some choices can make your game literally unwinnable and you have to restart...)

Extremely difficult to beat without looking anything up, and the puzzles are far more important than the combat

 

[Tom Baker's Arse]

Most definitely, Wizardry 4. The fact that those ninjas could one-shot you, and then you had enemy mages who were armed with AOE spells that were able to wipe entire parties of monsters - I remember this game just being ridiculously hard. The player was definitely set up for failure from the outset.

 

[octavius]

Combatwise Wiz 4 was not that hard (at least compared to some other TB Blobbers) until The Ziggurat (3rd or 4th level of the game).
Getting to the top of the Ziggurat was almost like a Sisophys simulator...

 

[V_K]

Legacy: Realm of Terror.
It's single-character and you can save anytime, but it won't help you much because resource management can will fuck you up real good in the long run.

 

[Fowyr]

Legacy: Realm of Terror.
It's single-character and you can save anytime, but it won't help you much because resource management can will fuck you up real good in the long run.

As man who finished Legacy four times, it's not really hard with katana and that Iron Fist spell or by using special items. Though it's indeed very, very hard game.

One of my fondest memories of CSB was the place where every time you passed a pit some munchers flowed up and started nibbling. After a while I got so tired of it that I jumped down the pit to exterminate the little buggers. I ended up in a room that was wall to wall muchers, and they munched up my party much faster that I could kill them.

Yep, I almost shat my pants.

 

[V_K]

As man who finished Legacy four times, it's not really hard with katana and that Iron Fist spell or by using special items.

I'd say unless the difficulty comes out of complete randomness (which is never a good design), any game is bound to feel much easier the 4th time around

 

[oneself]

Grimoire: Heralds of Winged Examplar. Nobody has ever beaten it.

 

[octavius]

Legacy: Realm of Terror.
It's single-character and you can save anytime, but it won't help you much because resource management can will fuck you up real good in the long run.

Been there, done that. Had to give up the first time due to running out of ammo.

 

[Dorateen]

Demise: Ascension

 

[Wayward Son]

Wizardry IV and Might and Magic 1 early on, as has already been stated.

 

[octavius]

The beginning of Alternate Reality: The Dungeon sounds absolutely viscious based on CRPG Addict's comments on his blog. But then he sometime make things harder for himself than needed...