Playing video games is meant to be a relaxing, joyful experience. People get home after work and get ready to unwind in a virtual world. Completing every achievement, requirement and difficulty setting in a game, though, can feel like getting home from work to start your second job.
These following games in particular have a reputation of being grueling, grindy, or just miserable experiences to try and do everything in. Some can get to be outright impossible, either due to multiplayer requirements or simple lack of time. If you pick up any of these games, explore them with a casual mindset.
Yakuza Series
Finishing the story is one thing. Achieving true completion in a Yakuza game means mastering minigames like Mahjong, shogi, gambling activities, and dozens of side objectives that many players never fully understand.
Silent Hill 3
Silent Hill 3 predates the achievement era, but completing everything is brutal. Unlocking every costume, weapon, ending, and bonus feature requires multiple playthroughs and highly specific performance requirements.
Dark Souls III
Several achievements require collecting covenant rewards originally designed around online multiplayer. For players tackling the game years later, the grind can become far more difficult than defeating any boss.
Call of Duty: World at War
The campaign’s Veteran difficulty is legendary for a reason. Endless grenade spam, pinpoint enemy accuracy, and brutal checkpoints make simply finishing the game a challenge, let alone earning every achievement.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
The zoo collection sounds simple until players realize how many animals must be captured. Some species are rare, region-specific, or easily overlooked during an already massive open-world adventure.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
With more than 700 achievements, Halo MCC is a completionist nightmare. Players must conquer speedruns, multiplayer challenges, LASO campaigns, collectibles, Easter eggs, and some of the hardest tasks in gaming.
Super Meat Boy
Many players finish Super Meat Boy and feel accomplished. Then they discover achievements requiring entire worlds to be completed without dying, transforming an already difficult platformer into a test of near-superhuman precision.
Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time
Crash 4 is notorious for demanding perfect relic runs, hidden collectibles, and brutally precise platforming. Many fans consider earning full completion more difficult than finishing most modern action games.
Batman: Arkham City
The Riddler trophies alone are enough to break some players. Add combat challenges, campaigns, and difficult training objectives, and Arkham City becomes a much larger commitment than its story suggests.
Lost Ark
Lost Ark overwhelms completionists with collectibles, achievements, islands, rapport systems, cards, and progression mechanics. Reaching true completion requires an extraordinary investment of both time and patience.
Assassin’s Creed Series
Many modern Assassin’s Creed games are technically easy to complete, but the sheer volume of collectibles, repetitive side activities, and map-clearing objectives turns 100 percent completion into an endurance challenge.
Celeste
Simply reaching the ending is only the beginning. Completionists must tackle B-Sides, C-Sides, golden strawberries, and some of the most demanding precision-platforming challenges ever designed.
The Binding of Isaac: Repentance
Unlocking every character, item, ending, and achievement requires hundreds of hours and countless successful runs. Randomness ensures that even highly skilled players cannot guarantee steady progress.
Diablo II
The legendary Holy Grail challenge asks players to collect every unique item in the game. Given the rarity of certain drops, many players spend years farming without ever completing the collection.
