Nintendo Hard/Rogue-like Games

"''You die...

Do you want your possessions identified? [ynq] (n) _''"

- Game Over screen, Nethack

Roguelikes. Their defining feature is having one life which, when lost, also deletes your save. Combining this with (seemingly) Everything Trying to Kill You and (often) dying repeatedly whilst learning how to survive in the gameworld ("Medusa - causes petrification. Sadly, so does eating her corpse") is part of the attraction.


 * Part of Nethack's difficulty is caused by the sheer randomness of the game with limited efforts to balance. There was one player who died without ever taking a turn - all because the game generated a random monster in line of sight of them at the start of the game, then randomly generated a wand in the possession of the monster, and randomly selected that wand to be a wand of death.
 * Slash'EM is another variant that takes Nethack and ups the ante. "Nethack doesn't care if you live or die. Slash'EM wants you dead."
 * Is Nethack too easy for you? Then it's time to play ADOM. Yup, it's a roguelike with a world map. Which means that there are multiple randomly-generated death trap dungeons for you to perish in. It's not uncommon for gamers to play a month or two before even getting to the main dungeon. And unlike Nethack, it only gets harder as you play. (If it takes a year before the average first win in Nethack, it takes about 5 years for ADOM. And let's not even mention the ultra endings...)
 * The worst Roguelike of all is probably Iter Vehemens Ad Necem (usually called IVAN). Its name translates from Latin as "A Violent Road To Death." It's intended to be effectively Unwinnable, although some players have managed to win anyway. This is a bug and will be fixed in the next release. ;)
 * Dwarf Fortress, where the main question is not "will your fortress collapse?" but "when and how will your fortress collapse?"
 * The question may also be "How do you feel like destroying this fortress?".
 * This is turned Up to Eleven by the "Dig Deeper" mod, which introduces orcs: trap-proof, door-unlocking fiends that turn up in huge numbers before the end of the first in-game year. (It's possible to end up outnumbered 7:1 by Orc mobs appearing before you've even got your first immigration wave, complete with Orc spearmasters, archers and mace lords).
 * POKEMON. MYSTERY. DUNGEON. No really. After you finish the story mode, some of the dungeons that you unlock can be downright impossible to go through. Some good examples are: Western Cave and Silver Trench in Red and Blue Rescue team, two dungeons that have 99 floors, keep ruining your items with traps, and have strong Pokémon. To take it up a notch, there are 99 floor dungeons that LOWER YOUR LEVEL TO LEVEL 1 (Wish Cave and Joyous Tower in PMD1 and Zero Isle East in PMD2). To make it even harder, there are 99 floor dungeons that lower your level to level 1, do not let you bring any money or items, and do not let you bring in any team members, essentially putting you in the mercy of the random number generator (Purity Forest in PMD1, Zero Isle West, and Zero Isle South in PMD2). Explorers of Sky essentially just decided to make the hardest dungeon possible by making it 99 floors, lower your level to level 1, does not allow you to bring in any items or money, prevents you from bringing any team members, and KEEPS TRAPS HIDDEN AFTER YOU TRIGGER THEM. And this is Explorers of Sky, which added new traps that get downright cruel.
 * Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky has the bonus dungeon Zero Island, which is broken into four sections spanning over 50 floors each and a different ruleset for each one. Depending on the section you attempt, you wont get any EXP from fallen monsters, your inventory gets completely or partially wiped of items, and/or the level of all members of your squad is (temporarily) set back to 1.