I'm glad you mentioned this! I completely agree... Which is kinda why I was asking about this in the first place. I was curious what others consider as objectively "difficult" for them, and I got my answer: my sense of "difficult" is very different from that of most Lemmy users...

fake difficulty

IMO I felt a lot of the answers pointed to games that are extremely high on the "cheap" scale... I mean yes cheap games are difficult, but yeah it does feel a bit artificial on the difficulty scale.

Which is also precisely why I didn't think of most platformers as among the hardest games. Like for example the original IWBTG; is it difficult? Sure it is, but a large part of it comes from the game being cheap AF... Someone with good platforming skills can clear every section with a few tries. And the higher difficulties just reduce the number of checkpoints, not actually making the game fundamentally more difficult... I mean there are genuinely difficult platformers but there are objectively more difficult games out there

so many kinds of difficulty

I'm actually surprised almost no one mentioned any type of PvP games or games that are primarily reliant on competing against other humans... they go insanely hard, but like how much of Street Fighter's difficulty is you being better than the other person vs just "know how the game works"?

If you want a game that not many people could beat

My favourite genre of games almost universally feature levels that probably fewer than 100 people across the world could beat (not counting customs), so... yeah.