That One Level/Puzzle Game

In games of puzzles, these stand out for being the most frustrating. Expect moon logic and confusion.

• "Make Ursa Major" and "Make Taurus" in Katamari Damacy. Both levels have as their requirement that you pick up exactly one of a given type of item--bear for Ursa Major and cow for Taurus. While any one will do, in order to get the best score possible (and avoid getting mocked by the King), you want the biggest one you can get. The problem is that you're being judged by the original King of All Cosmos... and he is a fricking idiot. He counts statues of bears or cows (and in the latter case, milk cartons) as appropriate items. Nothing is more frustrating than spending five minutes building the Katamari to the right size, rolling towards the giant brown bear... and then bumping a bear cub and getting yanked out of the level. And then insulted by the King.
  • One of the Taurus start positions put you on the roof of a building. If you roll forward at all, you will bump into a tiny cow-colored pylon and--guess what? IT'S A COOOWWWW! (Level ends).
  • The cows and bears showed up again in a level in the sequel, We Love Katamari, but this time you had to get one of either. Making it much less frustrating was a new feature added to WLK that let you restart a level if you were unhappy with your results.
    • What makes it even MORE annoying is that unlike other objects in the relevant stages, the cow and bear items WON'T vanish when they get too small to affect your Katamari's size. This means that it's possible to have an 8M Katamari poke against a tiny windup bear or bottle of milk that is small enough as to be invisible, and have the level instantly end.
  • For a level from the original that's tough to complete instead of tough to do well on, "Make a Star 4". You have ten minutes to go from five centimeters to one meter. You need all ten minutes.
  • The North Star in Katamari Damacy has you making a star that is exactly 10m. And you can't easily tell how big the Katamari is. Good luck with that. Thankfully, the King is fairly forgiving.
  • In Beautiful Katamari it gets worse, with the Roller Roaster. Your goal is to roll up hot stuff to hit 10,000 degrees. Problem is, it's far too easy to go careening into big bunches of what the level considers "cold" stuff, and you lose automatically if your katamari "freezes" (0 degrees).
    • In BK the Roller Roaster level is doubly hard if you're going for 100% Completion, in which case this level has some unique items that you have to be pretty large to get. So you have to balance your temperature with what you pick up and as soon as you get the item you need to make sure you have enough stuff around to finish the stage. Also, the last level where you need to stay away from the black hole until you're large enough to pick it up rather than get sucked into it is like this. Once again, not needed to beat the game but for achievements.
  • The campfire level from We Love Katamari also appearing in Katamari Forever. You must touch something EVERY FREAKING SECOND or your flame fizzles out in very short order. The objects don't add much fuel to your fire, and if you roll even a LITTLE into the water, you are extinguished immediately. That and Roller Roaster were two levels that a lot of gamers would have preferred to keep in the past.
• The prison break in Ghost Trick is infuriating. It's carried out in near-darkness (unless you're in the ghost world, where time stands still) and is both a stealth and escort mission, made doubly annoying due to the fact that it portrays a three-dimensional cutaway of the building in a two-dimensional perspective. It's hard to know, in one area, that you need to have Jowd hide behind the stairs because you can't even tell that area is accessible.
  • If you don't know that Jowd can hide behind the stairs, try figuring out without a guide that Jowd isn't supposed to go up the stairs normally, but has to jump up and go through a grate that one of the guards would be hiding in had you not opened it and made him fall by this point.
• The slow-tempo stages of the Lumines series. Depending on how filled with blocks your screen is when you get to them, they can either be these or chances to milk craptons of points. Lumines II is quite nasty with these kinds of levels, putting slow levels right before the last stage of each of the game's Challenge modes. In fact, one stage that was in the original had its line speed halved for II.
• Repton is a fairly straightforward game, certainly pretty easy by the standards set by later games in the series, until you reach the eleventh level, "Giant clam". On this level you have to collect diamonds while being pursued simultaneously by three monsters; their unpredictable movement means that often when you turn a corner to get away from one, the others will now be ahead of you. There are no rocks provided to kill the monsters, and every diamond in the field must be taken before leaving that area. Oh, and when you exit the area, a rock blocks it off, so the lower area must then be completed without losing a life.
  • There is a trick to make this level much easier. It won't help you with the lower area, and costs you one life, but it makes the upper area much, much easier. When the level starts, run immediately to the lower area entrance. When you finish it, make sure the three monsters are stuck right behind that boulder. Take the last diamond and lose one life. The monsters are now stuck and you can pick up all the remaining diamonds without too much hassle.
• Tetris the Grand Master 3 brings us Sakura mode, which has stages that can become nearly Unwinnable as a result of a single misplaced piece. Of note are the following stages:
  • Stage 8 -- Two horizontal U-shaped structures that have gems on their longer sides. In addition to that, the X-Ray item, which renders the playfield invisible save for a line that sweeps horizontally across the field activating every other piece.
  • Stage 15 -- A tall structure shaped somewhat like an hourglass. Unless you make some creative piece placements, you may find yourself needing to do the annoying "soft-drop the piece carefully then wait until it's at the right height" technique to slip pieces into the two overhangs. One mistake in placing pieces in those overhangs and you may as well skip to the next stage.
  • Stage 16 -- The stage itself isn't hard. The killer here is the Roll Roll item, which actives every third piece and causes your current piece to rotate automatically every split second. If you just rush through this stage, you'll have misrotated pieces foiling your run.
  • Almost all of the extra stages count. To begin with, there's stage EX3, which gives you double-sized pieces to work with. Unfortunately, the developers neglected to also double the number of cells that a piece moves (to accommodate their increased size), not unlike the case with TGM1's Big mode, and if you lock a piece in an odd-numbered column, you'll end up with a gap that is completely impossible to fill up.
  • Tetris Worlds has "hotline", where only lines at certain altitudes matter.
• Several of the gimmick levels for the Jewel Quest games can arguably be this, but there is no denying the monkey challenges. Here, not only do you have to turn all of the squares on the board gold, but you also have to put monkey relics in all of the available cages. The catch? Match up any three or more monkey relics, and whatever gold spaces they occupy are turned back to brown (meaning you'll have to turn them back, again), and they can be matched up with monkeys already in the cages, undoing all your hard work.
• Level 8-2 from Zuma is the third version of the Altar of Tlaloc map, which wasn't too bad before, except now you're working with all six colors and a longer starting chain on a map with a laughably short marble track (about 25% of which can't be hit because it's Fake Difficulty under the playfield.) Players have entered the stage with a full set of extra frogs and lost every single one.
• The N game has several of these. You play as a ninja who has to collect a blue block to switch open the exit door. Simple right? Now try doing that while avoiding the missiles, electric robots that follow you, the lasers, and the mines. Oh, and you blow up and die if you run out of time. Considering the fact that there are at least 500 levels in this game, there's no doubt that at least ten of them will piss you off to no end.
• In the Katamari Damacy clone The Wonderful End Of The World, the Cafe Internets level is significantly harder to get a successful score than any other level in the game. It's easy to become just large enough to make navigating the level practically impossible.
• Tetrisphere's Hide n' Seek mode has any level with the rare Crystal Tower rules. Tower rules task you with destroying\moving all the blocks around a tower to expose the picture underneath. Crystal Tower is much the same, except now the tower breaks if you move a block into it, or if any block is destroyed nearby. Normally you have 3 lives but breaking the tower is an automatic loss.
• In the online game Psychopath it's Level 55, Spaceship. The object of this game is to reach an exit in the given number of moves, which will always be the fewest possible. Spaceship tortures the player with a dozen possible approaches that fall just short, making it very hard to choose the correct approach. Even the level's creator originally set it to 221 moves -- then someone else pointed out that it can be done in 219, so now, of course, that's required.
• The Nintendo Hard Chip's Challenge has several of these. One of the most notable is Doublemaze, which is huge, painfully confusing, and difficult to navigate.