While you may think Triple-A games could use their endless resources to craft genuinely challenging experiences, that isn’t typically true. Indie games usually have to be the ones taking the task of making a hard game.

While some games are just inherently difficult to play, even more of them are really difficult to 100%, especially when you’re trying to get every achievement on top of doing everything the game has to offer.

I’ve come across quite a few games that are pretty manageable on the surface, but hellish to fully complete, and I’ll be focusing on titles that craft genuinely difficult challenges from their accessible mechanics.

Moreover, I think unfair difficulty requiring generally unreasonable tasks should be pretty absent from this list, as it’s not particularly a challenge of skill, but rather a challenge of how good you are at reading a wiki.

With that, let’s take a look at the 10 most challenging Indies to play to 100% completion.

10 Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

A Terrible Fate

Outer Wilds is my favorite game ever, yet I had a very rough time getting all the achievements, as all of them are things you thought you couldn’t do on a first playthrough.

Some story spoilers for Outer Wilds below.

Namely, in terms of base game achievements, landing on the Sun Station or going into Giant’s Deep’s core are massive pains in the ass, especially if you’re trying not to use a guide. The DLC gets even worse.

Plenty of these achievements are manageable, sure, but then there are things like jumping away from one of the Owlk before they kill you, which you think would be easy, but the conditions to unlock it are so specific you’ll never get it on your own.

The hardest thing, though, is easily trying to ride the wave in The Stranger for a while. It requires super-precision positioning with a physics-based object that doesn’t actually allow for much precision, making it take a few dozen tries that all take 10+ minutes.

9 Risk of Rain 2

Avalanche of Accomplishments

Risk of Rain 2 is a roguelike that you can get a few hundred hours of content out of, and the main reason why is the unlockables that all have pretty specific achievements associated with them.

While a hundred of them are pretty manageable accomplishments you can get through by just grinding out runs forever, the remaining 20 are quite difficult in an already hard game (when you aren’t playing in baby mode).

Killing Mithrix with a supply beacon requires some great timing, positioning, and a waste of one of your best resources, and killing an Imp Overlord with the Preon Accumulator feels like complete RNG whether or not it gives you the necessary unlock.

The worst offender to me, though, is Ethereal, which requires you to beat a Prismatic Trial as Mercenary without getting hit. This wouldn’t be so bad if Prismatic Trials weren’t the randomized daily run mode, making this achievement intensely difficult unless you like waiting.

8 Balatro

Trick Up Your Sleeve

Balatro is the card game roguelike everyone’s been obsessed with, and this game easily has one of the most grindy sets of achievements and unlocks, requiring great strategy and a hell of a lot of time on your hands.

While some of the rarer trophies are earned by just planning a run around getting the achievement, such as playing a flush with 5 wild cards, the three Completionist achievements are pure evil.

For these, you’ll need to discover every Joker, Spectral Card, etc. in the game, which requires buying all of them at least once, and that could take forever. But winning with every deck on Gold Stake difficulty is incredibly challenging, and it definitely takes forever.

Even worse, though, the final Completionist achievement has you getting a gold sticker on every Joker, which means winning a run with every single Joker in the game on Gold Stake. Considering I can barely win a Gold Stake run with the Spectral deck, that sucks.

7 Celeste

500 Meter Dash

Celeste is already a pretty tough precision platformer, and while getting through the main eight levels won’t kill you, the B and C sides, plus Chapter 9 and the challenges it brought, all stretch you pretty thin.

Completing every B and C side, plus collecting every strawberry and completing chapter 9 are where you’d expect your 100% journey to end, and that’s difficult enough. But there’s even more challenge afterward.

The achievement for getting a 1-up requires you to carry 10 strawberries on you, which means you can barely land on the ground without messing up and having to restart, and getting WOW requires a ton of extra platforming in chapter 9.

That said, one last thing to get isn’t even an achievement, because that’d be too cruel. Golden Strawberries can be found at the start of every level, and require you to play the entire thing without dying, and that’s pure evil.

6 Hollow Knight

Bugged Up

Hollow Knight is a hand-drawn Metroidvania with Dark Souls-inspired combat, and that leads to some supremely difficult combat segments that were so challenging they demotivated me from fully completing the entire game.

While you’ll come across some difficult fightsin the base game, once you get to the Godhome content, you’ll be doing these massive boss gauntlets that buff every boss in the game and get progressively more difficult.

These Pantheon challenges come to a head in Pantheon 5, where you need to fight every single boss in the game all in one go, and if you die once, you go right back to the start. Which is even worse, due to the Absolute Radiance fight decimating you off the rip.

Even after that, the achievements are genuinely evil, requiring you to 100% the game in 5 hours, finish the game in permadeath mode, and as a further slap in the face, 100%-ing the game with permadeath. Can’t wait for Silksong to be even harder.

5 Terraria

Brick by Brick

Hey, you like Terraria? That’s cool. Now go fish for a solid hundred hours to platinum it, I’m sure that’ll be a great time. I love this game to death, and it’s one of my most prestigious platinums, but man, it sucked to get.

Not only do some achievements require quite a bit of grinding and waiting, namely ones based around random events like the Blood Moon or Slime Pets, but a few go even further and present something challengingthat takes forever.

Getting the Cell Phone, Ankh Shield, and Zenith all take a ton of exploring, killing enemies, and doing it till you’ve got a couple dozen assorted things you’d never use if they weren’t able to be combined, which is a whole process.

The hardest of them, though, isn’t in the game yet but is already confirmed to be coming out this year. That would be an achievement for getting 100% bestiary completion, and if you’ve ever tried getting a Nymph Banner, you know why that’s difficult.

4 The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

Divine Dedication

Roguelikes can tend to get a spot on this list, and while I had some restraint with my picks from the genre, there was no way I wasn’t going to include The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth’s whopping 640 achievements.

There’s one achievement for getting every single item, and those achievements are all tied to doing really specific stuff, namely defeating every boss with every character, or just donating your life savings as any true gambler should.

Of course, there’s always the dreaded RNG element, and while you can do your best to route for a lot of these achievements, tons of them will come down to restarting over and over again to get 5 damn Gulp! Pills.

Even if you’re the luckiest person on earth, you’ll still need to overcome your skill issue and lock-in on beating 5 daily challenges in a row. It’s something I can only recommend to those with a few thousand hours on their hands.

3 Stardew Valley

Hell in Paradise

You’d probably think one of the coziest little farming games of all time would be an easy romp through, but that just tells me you’ve never gotten deep into Stardew Valley to know the completion process is a bit hellish.

Getting Perfection is already an achievement with a pretty huge undertaking, requiring you to get to maximum friendship with every NPC, ship every item, and blow around 13,000,000g on structures you’ll barely use since you’re in the endgame now.

On top of Perfection, though, there are achievements that require you to go even further beyond, getting every book in the game, maxing out and perfecting all your skills, and worst of all, going to the arcade.

Journey of the Prairie King is an optional shoot-em-up minigame, but if you want every achievement, you need to beat it without dying once, which is such an extraordinarily precise and challenging task that the creator hadn’t done it himself for the longest time.

2 Cookie Clicker

Surprisingly Strategic

You might write off Cookie Clicker as another idle game that asks nothing of you other than clicking mindlessly for hours. Yet, there’s genuinely a ton of strategies you need to employ if you want to get to the end, and that is a ridiculous feat.

Of the 637 achievements, a solid 8% of them will take you hours of planning, making builds, unlocking upgrades, and a lot of actively clicking Golden Cookies and trying to combo them into each other for a chance at an achievement.

The endgame of Cookie Clicker is wild, and if you think it’s just a matter of making a good build and waiting, you’re dead wrong. Even with the best build possible, it’ll still take hundreds of years idling to get the last few achievements.

In my 2,300 hours of Cookie Clicker, quite a bit of it was spent with the game open on a side monitor, which made the shift to rapidly grabbing a Golden Cookie, selling buildings for a buff, taking out a loan, and summoning another cookie quite the wild one.

1 Tower Unite

Just Keep Gambling

If you wanted a game that’s essentially VRChat without the VR, but with a ton of great mini-games and attractions to make up for it, Tower Unite is what you’re looking for.

This is the only game on Steam I’ve seen that has a pretty big following and 36 achievements at a 0.0% average completion rate. It has a whopping 651 things to unlock, all encouraging you to master every aspect of the game.

Sure, some are a bit brain-dead easy, like putting on a workshop model or visiting another player, but then you’ve got achievements for landing a hole-in-one on 67 different mini-golf holes, or getting a 5000-note score in that piano arcade game.

I play this game to relax and have a good time, and I’ve wondered what going for platinum would be like, but I am far too afraid to consider dedicating my entire life to this game. If you say you’ve platinumed it legitimately, I don’t believe you.