Indie games have the freedom to be whatever they want to be, which often means they go far further than AAA games when it comes to raw content completeness. However, that also means that some indie games are incredibly difficult to 100% complete, even for dedicated completionists.
Whether it’s incredibly difficult challenges that require massive expertise or massive grimoires' worth of collectibles, indie games constantly push the boundaries of how difficult they can make a 100% be.
In the indie game boom of the 2010s, it became increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd, particularly in the roguelike space where every indie developer seems to be releasing a new iteration on the genre. EnterCrypt of the NecroDancerthat reinvented the genre by making it into a rhythm game instead.
What resulted is an incredibly compelling gameplay experience with a high-skill ceiling. However, getting every single achievement in the game requires mastery not just of the game’s rhythm mechanics, but also immense skill, memory, and dedication to perfect across the game’s many levels and collectibles.
BeforeBalatrotook the world by storm and showed just how addictive deck-builders could be,Slay the Spirepaved the way in the indie space by combining the deck-builder with a dungeon-crawling adventure where the player’s ability to make mechanical combos is key to survival.
100% completion is difficult inSlay the Spiresimply due to the immense difficulty of doing the ascendancy runs. They require an absolute mastery of the game systems, an understanding of each character’s unique mechanics,a strong knowledge of starting bonuses and improvised build creation, and, frankly, a little luck.
Hollow Knighthas long been held up as the platonic ideal of what a modern indie Metroidvania should look like, building out a compelling world with challenging combat, a massive host of collectables, and a whole lot of world to explore. However, 100% completion requires mastering the game’s greatest challenge: the Pantheon of Hallownest.
In the Pantheon of Hallownest, players are expected to defeat the hard versionsof every single boss in the gamein a row without dying. If the player dies, they go right back to the start. This locks one of the hardest trophies in the game, requiring absolute mastery for anyone who wants to 100% completeHollow Knight.
Procedural generation is one of the primary tools of indie games to craft a massive amount of content on a relatively short amount of time.Spelunky 2, the 2020 sequel to the popular originalSpelunky, dials that up to eleven, resulting in a great game, but with a massive amount of content.
100% completion ofSpelunky 2essentially means making many successful runs through the game’s dungeons with every different character, picking up every item, and doing it fast. It takes a lot of skill to remember the many trapsSpelunky 2’scaves have to offer, making the completionist process a tough one.
Enter the Gungeontook the procedural generation trend of modern indie games and decided to go wild with it, creating massive complex dungeons that are filled with increasingly impossible enemies and hundreds of guns.
Collecting all characters, guns, and performing successful runs with all of them is difficult enough, but the game also takes clear inspiration from bullethell games, meaning that it requires immense concentration from the player with an very high difficulty level to even reach the end of one run, never mind several.
Celestetook the world by storm in 2018 as the platonic ideal of what a modern indie platformer should be, leaning into its emotional story but not skimping on incredibly difficult platforming challenges that had broadly fallen out of favor since the 1990s.
To 100% completeCeleste, players not only need to beat every level but also the tricky B-side levels andthe difficult DLC levels, and do them perfectly as fast as possible. The levels get so difficult that the game turns into a puzzle game rather than a platformer, testing the patience of even the most grizzled gaming veteran. However, it’s so satisfying to 100%, which makes the whole endeavour worth it.
Super Meat Boymay not be very popular today, but it’s important to remember that it formed the vanguard of the indie game explosion in the early 2010s, charming console and PC gamers alike with a platformer that is incredibly fast, and absolutely brutal in its difficulty level.
100% completion ofSuper Meat Boyrequires nothing less than absolute mastery of the game’s distinctive momentum and speed mechanics, flying through levels at near-light speed with absolutely no room for error. It’s infamously difficult, but 100% completion means there are few other platformers that will pose much of a challenge (though some give it a run for its money)
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirthis, simply put, one of the best games ever made. Making use of gross horror aesthetics but compiling them into a compelling procedurally generated dungeon crawler, the insane amount of items, abilities, pick-ups, characters, bosses, and builds a player has to navigate reaches into the thousands, and that’s before any of the challenge runs.
100% completion ofThe Binding of Isaac: Rebirthwill take hundreds, if not thousands of hours, due to the massive amount of content to be reckoned with. There’s a good reason people are still playing it to this day, and it’s hard to imagine how indie games will ever be tougher to 100% than this.
