12 Hardest PS1 Games

Nightmare Creatures draws on gothic horror from the 19th century. Its story starts in 1666, when a devil-worshipping cult called the Brotherhood of Hecate ran sinister experiments in London, hoping to take over the city and then the world. The experiments made only grotesque monsters. One of the cult's own members, Samuel Pepys, set their headquarters on fire, and that fire became the First Great Fire of London. The game is set in 1834, with the dead waking from their graves and a mad scientist named Adam Crowley behind it all. He was based on the occultist Aleister Crowley.

Players call it brutal. Even the ones who love it blame the clunky controls and the platforming, and they remember plenty of cheap design choices along the way. It plays like a horror film where the monster also gets to work the camera.

Resident Evil was conceived by producer Tokuro Fujiwara, inspired by the limitations of his 1989 horror game Sweet Home. It started out as a Super NES game in 1993 and went through several redesigns before it became a third-person game. Chris and Jill begin with only a survival knife and a Beretta, and the zombies and other monsters in the Mansion attack them on sight. Take too much damage and you die and restart from your last save.

Players who go back to the first one say it is much harder than the newer games, mostly because of the controls and the camera. They also say the original release is the hard one, because auto-aim only arrived with the Director's Cut. If you want the full 1996 experience, find the first pressing and bring patience.

In Heart of Darkness you play a child named Andy who sets out to rescue his dog from creatures known as the Dark Souls. It was supervised by Éric Chahi, known for Another World, and it has about half an hour of cinematic storytelling. Film and television composer Bruce Broughton wrote the score. Development dragged on through numerous delays and changes in platform, and in 2007 Chahi admitted the six years had completely exhausted him.

Players name it fast when the talk turns to the hardest games on the console. They call it infuriating and ridiculously hard, and in the same breath they call it an amazing game. You die, you watch Andy go in some new and horrible way, and you try the jump again.

Tomb Raider is a 3D action game developed by Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive. You guide Lara Croft, a British archaeologist, through a series of tombs and other locations in search of ancient treasures. On the way you kill dangerous animals and other creatures and solve puzzles to reach the prize, usually a powerful artifact. It was critically acclaimed and widely influential, and it spawned sequels and a franchise of related media.

Most of its difficulty comes from getting lost. Players say it was hard because you had no idea where to go, and some only finished it with a walkthrough open. Plenty of others call the first game easy, though, which is why its sequel sits higher on this list.

Alundra came from the people responsible for Landstalker on the Genesis. It came out in Japan in 1997, and Working Designs brought it to North America in January 1998. Its big idea is dream walking. Alundra can enter people's dreams, and each dream level has its own twist based on the dreamer's personality. It earned critical acclaim, and the graphics were the one element critics really picked at.

The puzzles are what players remember. They call it hard as nails, in the puzzles and in the combat, and plenty of them admit they never beat it. It looks like a friendly action RPG from the cover. It is not friendly.

FromSoftware made business software for eight years before it made games, and King's Field was its debut. The first one only came out in Japan. Its follow-up, King's Field II, was released globally as simply King's Field, so that is the one most players outside Japan know. It is an action RPG played from a first-person perspective, and you find keys and items that open doors and activate portals to other levels of the dungeon. The series went on to inspire Shadow Tower and the Dark Souls games.

Fans of Dark Souls come here to see where it started, and they find a slow game that explains nothing. Players call it pretty hard, especially without a guide, and they wish newcomers good luck. That is FromSoftware for you, even in 1996.

Einhänder is a futuristic side-scrolling shooter with simulated 3D gameplay. It came out in Japan on November 20, 1997, and Sony Computer Entertainment released it in North America on May 5, 1998. The story is a war between Sodom, an Earth colony, and Selene, a colony on the Moon. When your pilot dies, they advance two classes and are awarded the Sirius decoration, which tells you how the game expects things to go. Kenichiro Fukui composed the techno and trance soundtrack.

Critics only complained that it was short and had no two-player mode. Short does not mean easy. Players call it a very hard game, and even the ones who are decent at shooters say this one is in a different ballpark. A few shooter veterans beat it in one credit and wonder what the fuss is about, which keeps it in the middle of this list.

Unlike its predecessors, Tomb Raider III was primarily developed for the PlayStation. It runs on an upgraded engine with coloured lighting and triangular polygons, which let the team build greater detail and more complex geometry. A big part of the game takes place underwater. Some pools hold piranhas that can kill Lara within seconds, and others have currents that pull her one way so she cannot swim back or grab a ledge. Critics liked it, though less than the first two, and its difficult and unforgiving gameplay drew some criticism.

On the PlayStation you can only save with the save crystals you find in each level, and players blame them for most of the pain. Run out, and one trap can cost you a long stretch of the level. Players who know the series say this is the hardest of the original games, harder than Tomb Raider II.

Vagrant Story was made by the team behind Final Fantasy Tactics, with Yasumi Matsuno as director, producer, designer and writer. You play Ashley Riot, an agent of the Riskbreakers, on a dungeon crawl full of vicious monsters. Ashley's Break Arts trade his own hit points for more damage, and a crafting system lets you build weapons and armor in workshop areas. Matsuno later revealed that over half of the game's story was cut. It still received critical acclaim, and some call it one of the greatest games of all time.

The difficulty sneaks up on you. Players say you hit a wall if you do not learn how the battle system works, and the game does not stop to teach you. They say it kicked their butt, and some measure Dark Souls against it instead of the other way around.

Naughty Dog and Universal Interactive chose the PlayStation for Crash because Sony lacked a mascot character, and the game was unveiled at E3 1996. Critics even praised its difficulty level, and it sold over 6 million units. Clear a level in one life without breaking every crate, and the game shows how many you missed. Lose a life along the way, and it sends you straight back to the map screen. Cortex's bonus rounds are the hardest part of all, and they are only in two levels.

Players who grew up on the later games are in for a shock. They call the first one difficult and unforgiving, the hardest Crash of them all, and say they can finish the sequels in their sleep but not this one. A mascot game made to sell a console turned out to be a test.

Driver makes you John Tanner, an undercover cop who uses his driving skill to get inside a criminal organization. It is played in Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, each only partially faithful to the real city layouts. It stood out at the time because you could explore each city as an open world, and it sold over 4 million units.

Before any of that, you have to pass the tutorial. Players call it the hardest tutorial ever, and a lot of them never got past it. The ones who did still had the final mission ahead, a chase players remember as crazy difficult. Driver is the rare game where the first level is the one people talk about.

Michel Ancel came up with Rayman as a teenager and made it real after Ubi Soft hired him in 1989. The game was aimed at the Atari ST and then the Super NES CD-ROM before Ubi Soft made it a launch title for the PlayStation in North America and Europe, to compete with Japanese platform games. Rayman has no arms or legs. He hovers with his hair and attacks by throwing his fists. It became one of the best-selling PlayStation games.

Ancel knew who he was making it for. While the graphics and music seemed childish at times, he said, the challenge targeted experienced players, and some critics complained about the high difficulty. Players say the cheerful look fools you, because the game turns brutal toward the end, and they call it the steepest difficulty shift they have seen. Players put it at the top of this list.