We don’t often look into the ‘Worst‘ of things on this blog, but sometimes it can be fun to let off a little steam by venting about things we don’t like, right? And when it comes to video game levels, there’s quite a few stinkers mixed in with the brilliant gems. Why don’t we spend a bit of time this week looking into the Top 10 Worst Levels that I’ve personally experienced the grueling slog of having to overcome!
Let’s get into this mess!
10) Stanton’s Liver ~ Borderlands the Pre-Sequel
To kick off our list, we’ve got a level that I’m adding simply because of circumstantial factors, and not really a direct aspect of the level itself. Because, on the surface, Stanton’s Liver is a perfectly normal Borderlands level with a neat little cave hidden in the back. The trouble is that it feels like a million side quests take place here…and yet there’s no fast-travel station. So every time you need to come here (which is a lot), you have to warp to the fast-travel nearest station outside the level, awkwardly sprint over to the base of the cliff leading to this map, then platform up the cliff to reach the entrance. And then do it all in reverse when you’re ready to leave again!
9) The Woodland Snare (Part One) ~ Valkyria Chronicles
Stealth games can be a ton of fun. Stealth moments within non-stealth games are rarely half as enjoyable. Sometimes it works, but often it fails utterly. One such example comes in an early-ish level from Valkyria Chronicles, where you end up wounded and separated from the rest of your squad, and forced to creep your way through a dark forest. Thematically, kinda interesting. Gameplay-wise, it’s a mess. Your movement speed is excruciatingly slow, visibility is bad, and there are enemies lurking in places so impossible to predict that you’ll constantly be reloading your save file just to make it through unscathed. It’s simply not fun. The following level (and its story cutscenes) are good, though!
8) Creepy Steeple ~ Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
This game has a reputation for having extremely taxing backtracking, and this level right here is the primary culprit. Similar to the Stanton’s Liver example on this list, Creepy Steeple itself is super cool. It’s just that you visit the steeple, defeat the bad guy, then end up having to travel back to town on-foot (and by yourself, since your party members leave at this point). Then you have to go back through the woods, re-visit Creepy Steeple, and then head back to town once more. And then you have to journey out to the steeple for a third time! It’s such stupid game design that I’m convinced it’s a purposefully sadistic prank the developers are pulling on the player. It’s also something that was rectified in its entirety with the stellar remake that came out the other year.
7) The Shipyard ~ Uncharted 3
I love Uncharted 3 to death, but it’s undoubtedly a bit of a mess of a game. A beautiful mess, but a mess nonetheless. Out of all the strange things this game does, however, nothing stands out more than the Shipyard. It’s a sizable, lengthy portion of the middle of the game that has absolutely nothing to do with any main plot or character development. It exists purely for padding the length of the game, as you swim around a hail of bullets, climb on rickety old ship parts, leap from yacht-to-yacht during a thunderstorm, and survive a capsizing cruise ship. Lots of cool moments, to be sure, but it’s lack of narrative cohesion really sucks. Oh, and the biggest factor…it’s all so infuriatingly difficult! Expect to see about a million death screens before conquering this part of the game.
6) Mountaintop of the Giants ~ Elden Ring
Elden Ring starts to fall apart at the seams the longer the game goes on for, and I think this late-game area is perhaps the most unforgivable part. It looks as visually jaw-dropping as anything else in Elden Ring does, but the issue lies in the game design. Despite being a climactic moment near the game’s conclusion, the entire area doesn’t consist of a single new enemy or mini-boss you haven’t already faced. It’s a mountain filled with recycled assets and reused baddies, and it just leaves this disgusting taste of laziness in your mouth while you’re playing. And the one genuinely new boss, the Fire Giant? I won’t go into a lengthy boss dissertation or anything here, but let’s just say that no one’s clamoring to put that guy at the top of their list of favorite bosses anytime soon…
5) Lost Izalith ~ Dark Souls
For those unaware, the original Dark Souls ran into some crazy development issues near the end, forcing the game to be rushed across the finish line. And so here we end up with a level very similar to the previous entry (and made by the same developers). The negative factors are a bit different though, as Lost Izalith actually does have new enemies. It just also has a sprawling, labyrinthine layout with no worthwhile items or secrets to justify the big size, haphazard design that feels like a child slapped a bunch of level-building blocks together, gimmicky mechanics and obtuse NPC quest design, and one of the worst (and most infamous) bosses in any video game ever with the Bed Of Chaos. It’s one of the (many) contributing factors that weigh this game down in its second-half.
4) Spirit Crucible Elpys ~ Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Sometimes, story-and-gameplay integration can be pretty cool. For example, the moments in the first Xenoblade Chronicles where you have to use special tactics to defeat the Mechon because you don’t have the Monado. But then we have the Spirit Crucible Elpys from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which I’ll give a small amount of credit to for being ambitious…it just fails in every way. It’s a big, lengthy dungeon filled with secrets and alternate paths. The issue? You’re not allowed to use Pyra/Mythra while exploring (which is annoying), and you’re not allowed to use in Blade Specials stronger than Level One.
Trouble is, you need Blade Specials above Level One in order to do combos or use chain attacks. So since you can’t, you have to endure this entire dungeon without being able to actually engage with the game’s own combat mechanics! I honestly feel like I’ve never played a game that has shot itself in the foot so badly in terms of ruining its own mechanics like this dungeon does!
3) Carnival Night Zone ~ Sonic the Hedgehog 3
I’d heard horror stories about this level on gaming forums and YouTube videos, but for years never managed to experience it for myself. Well, I recently played through Sonic Origins, and thus had the chance to actually tackle and conquer Sonic the Hedgehog 3 for the first time ever (never made it past Marble Garden Zone when I was a kid). It was a…rough…experience, but by far the worst bit of all of it was trying to slog my way through Carnival Night Zone, easily the worst zone from any Sonic game that I’ve ever played.
The infamous Barrel Of Doom wasn’t even the worst part, at least when you know the trick (and if you don’t, it is objectively one of the worst-designed moments of any video game). The level also has underwater sections for no reason other than to be annoying, springs and bumpers that send you flying in directions you don’t want to go, and multiple unavoidable insta-death crushing sections that you’ll only survive once you’ve died to them once and know that they’re coming! Toss in some hellish spike placements, and you’re in for an aggravating experience that’ll make you want to tear your hair out!
2) The Ancient Forest ~ Monster Hunter World
I’m pretty sure I’ve gone on record before explaining that I’m actually a fan of dense, complicated levels in video games. That being said, even I have my limit, and the Ancient Forest soars right past that! I can’t even begin to wrap my head around why the developers of this game thought that the Ancient Forest was a good idea, and I kinda feel like they just got so caught up in trying to push the power of the next-gen PlayStation 4 to its limit that they didn’t heed Ian Malcolm’s advice to wonder whether-or-not they even should!
If the Ancient Forest was just the circular-shaped ground floor of the map, it’d actually be pretty cool. Maybe toss in the tree in the center too. The issue is that the Ancient Forest has about five hundred different layers, intersecting passages, crisscrossing pathways, secret tunnels, one-way dropoffs, varied elevations, and rooms you can only access from one hyper-specific direction. It’s a nightmare, and it’d be an unnavigable hellscape if not for your little guidance bugs that tell you where to go…which itself is a huge issue, because it feels like those bugs only exist as a band-aid solution to this level’s terribleness in the first place!
1) St. Frangelico Cathedral ~ Lies of P
Arguably, my hatred of this level is a tad overblown in the grand scheme of things, but this is my list gosh-darn-it, so I’ll put this level at the top anyway!
There are certain tropes of game design that certain games just aren’t suited to. You wouldn’t put an exceptionally slow opera piece in a fast-paced rhythm game. You wouldn’t shove a driving minigame into a visual novel. So on and so forth. Well, the developers of Lies of P clearly didn’t care about that sort of thing when designing St. Frangelico’s Cathedral, opting to eschew common sense and human decency to craft a level that just sucks to play, and killed a part of my soul each time I had to run through it while going for this game’s platinum trophy.
Poison water everywhere? Check! Giant rolling boulders? Check! Enemies that drop from the ceiling? Check! Traps littering the floor all around you? Check! Lengthy areas you need to run through before reaching any checkpoints? Check! Long distances you need to sprint to get back to where you’d died if (when) you die? Check! An insane amount of platforming on tiny little bridges, where a single mistake equals instant-death, and there’s enemies sniping at you with projectiles that’ll knock you off too? Triple check!
This game is good. This level is not.
But hey, that’s just my opinion!
The Contrarian Corner 