I think I'm falling in the same category as most people, "I can beat my own game but completely mastering it is very hard"
...but as a game designer I also need to point some issues on just saying "my game is too hard" and using that as an excuse for not playtesting your game:
- if you cannot beat your game, you (often but not always) cannot ensure it is possible
- if the developer of the game, even after weeks, months or maybe years of playing, cannot beat it's own game, let's be realistic what are the odds of a player beating it?
Also, for your game to have a group of people willing to try to beat these challenges, you need a fun game, with a good difficulty progression, and some kind of incentive for the players to grind a top playing field (the latter usually comes when you have a game with good community support). Otherwise players will lowkey not care with the hardest challenges of your game lol
If you're still reading this, you might be thinking about my games. Just look at some examples of my games:
- in my game "paradox space", we have over 70 levels (with almost 30 to come), divided in difficulty tiers from 1-, 1, 1+ to 6+, and a big list that ranks the difficulty of all the levels in the main game, in it's community edition and in it's fanmades. It usually takes me over a day to beat a level around the hardest difficulty tiers with checkpoints, and it also usually takes me days to beat some levels around 1+ difficulty without checkpoints, so it would probably take months or years to beat the hardest levels perfectly (or for players to even get to know how to beat these levels with checkpoints at first place)
- in my game "eternal fall", an endless runner where you just fall and dodge obstacles, my record is ~12000 points, but to unlock a secret world (designed to be borderline impossible and requiring a strong community of people with insane levels of dedication), you need to get 50000 points. And after some point thresholds that cause the game to get harder, the last threshold is at 1000000 points, that causes the game to pretty much spawn an obstacle per frame
- in my game "collapse", you have several levels to beat, and unlike most of my other games, each level is usually just around 10 seconds long, but a set of slightly secret levels, the "expert challenges", require extreme player control, very tight inputs and limited vision. I just managed to beat a few levels of this set of levels, but several of these levels are unverified (with one being just theoretically possible)
So yes, I think I am the king of "brutally hard games"...