Games That Very Few People Have Achieved 100%
So, you've beaten the game, but have you truly mastered it? Have you tackled every challenge, hunted down every collectible, and dominated every optional challenge? After all, almost everyone can manage to play until they beat the final boss or complete the final mission. It takes a rarer breed of player to latch onto a game, squeeze out every last bit of content, and utterly and completely bend it to their will.
Not every game is made equal, however. Even if you have the drive, some games are almost impossible to 100%. Note the "almost." Dominating the following titles requires some impressive skills — or, at the very least, a whole bunch of spare time — but it can be done. It's simply not common. Very, very few people have managed to do everything that there is to do in the following games, and those who have a part of a very small and exclusive club. Who knows? Maybe, with enough practice, you'll join them someday. Hey, anything is possible.
To finish this one, you'll need to wish upon a SingStar
Yes, you read that right: SingStar, Sony Computer Entertainment's casual karaoke title, is one of the hardest games to 100%. Not many people have done it: according to PSNProfiles, only 0.66% of SingStar owners have earned the PS3 edition's elusive platinum trophy. In reality, that number is probably even lower. PSNProfiles mainly tracks hardcore players — you know, the kinds of people who are focused on collecting trophies. Compared to the rest of the world, PSNProfiles' completion percentages tend to be higher than average.
Now, SingStar isn't a rare 100% because nobody's playing the game — the SingStar franchise is incredibly popular, especially in Europe, where fans have picked up more than 12 million copies of the game. It's hard to complete because many of the trophies take a ton of time to complete. If you want to get the "BFF" trophy, for example, you need to sing with a friend 300 times. For "Musical Marathon," you'll need to complete 400 tracks. Even if you're a professional vocalist, that's a lot of singing.
Other trophies require some pretty serious pipes, too. Performing vibrato for 300 seconds — that's five solid minutes — or singing with perfect pitch for 10,000 seconds, which is almost three hours, just isn't something that all of us can do. Throw in some trophies that can only be earned on specific dates, like Valentine's Day or Christmas, and you've got a game that's deceptively difficult to complete. Keep those throat lozenges handy. You're gonna need 'em.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Devil Daggers is hard
In order to get 100% in Devil Daggers, all you need to do is earn one achievement. Last for 500 seconds, and the aptly named "Devil Dagger" trophy is yours. That's not a long time. That's about how long it takes to clean a bathroom, unload the dishwasher, or take a shower. Heck, for most people, it takes more than 500 seconds to finish a normal cup of coffee.
In Devil Daggers, however, 500 seconds is an eternity. Not that there's much to Devil Daggers. After retrieving the titular dagger, you simply stand in an empty, flat room and hurl blades at waves of increasingly difficult enemies, looting their bodies for gems that you can use to buy upgrades. If you want the achievement, though, you don't really need to worry about that. Getting 100% doesn't require you to amass a certain number of kills or get certain upgrades. All you need to do is survive for a little over eight minutes. Easy, right?
Not so fast. Devil Daggers was inspired by old '90s shooters like DOOM and Quake, as well as classic arcade titles. If you weren't around during that era, rest assured, those games take no prisoners. Devil Daggers is the same way. If you're hit once, you're dead. Game over. End of story. That's why only 0.1% of players have managed to finish it. Devil Daggers plays for keeps. If it's too hard for you? Well, that's just too darn bad.
An accomplishment fit for a crusading king
If you're the person who likes to finish things, be very careful when booting up Crusader Kings II. Paradox's epic strategy game doesn't have any real objectives. As long as you've got a viable heir to keep your dynasty going, Crusader Kings II will let you do whatever you want, at least until the 16th century approaches, bringing Crusader Kings' pre-defined timeline to a close.
So, if you want to truly 100% Crusader Kings II, you'll need to start knocking items off of the game's achievements list. As you might expect, that isn't easy. On Steam, only 12% of players have managed to unlock the most common achievement, "The Marriage Game," which simply requires you to marry another character. A paltry 0.7% of players have managed a kingdom all the way from 769, the game's earliest start date, to 1453, when the game ends.
If you want to 100% Crusader Kings II, you'll also need to play as a woman and have three separate husbands killed, help the Anti-Christ take control of the Satanist Church, and successfully send an elephant to trample the Pope. As you go down the list, things get even weirder — only 0.1% of players have dared to "eat a character of the Bön religion" to earn "Bön Appétit!" achievement, for example. Crusader Kings II is an amazing game, but if you're trying get 100%, you're going to need an iron will. As you can see, this game is not for the faint of heart.
The Necrodancer's beat is tough to, well, beat
Ryan Clark, lead director and programmer for Crypt of the Necrodancer, thought that 100%'ing the roguelike rhythm game was more or less impossible. After all, it's not like the game is easy. In Crypt of the Necrodancer, you can only move or attack if you hit a button on the background music's beat. Missing a note doesn't usually penalize you, but it will prevent you from taking an action, which can leave you vulnerable to incoming enemies.
While Crypt of the Necrodancer begins with a single character, you can unlock more, each of which slightly changes the way that the game plays. Coda, who gets unlocked after you finish the experts-only "All Chars Mode" — itself a daunting task — makes a tough game even harder. See, Coda isn't very resilient. Almost everything kills her. Collect a piece of gold? Dead. Get hit by an enemy? Dead. Miss a note, even while facing off against a boss with a 350 beat per minute soundtrack (Coda makes everything twice as fast as normal)? Yeah. Dead.
As Necrodancer's programmer, Clark is pretty decent at the game, but he's never finished a Coda run. He even named the achievement for doing so "Impossible, Right?" Well, it's not. Not only have 0.2% of Steam users managed to complete the task, but in 2016, Clark watched a speedrunner called SpootyBiscuit completely dominate the game with Coda, and then go on to do it again without picking up any items. "He has defeated my game utterly," Clark says, "and I couldn't be happier about it."
Mortal Kombat's hardest achievement is a month in the making
How much do you like Mortal Kombat? Enough to spend four solid weeks playing it? Because, if you want to accomplish everything that the 2011 fighting game asks you to, that's exactly what you're going to need to do.
For the most part, most of Mortal Kombat's achievements are fine. Performing a fatality, which unlocks the "Fatality!" achievement and trophy, is something that you'll accomplish during regular gameplay. "What Does This Button Do??," which requires you to beat the arcade ladder without blocking, can be challenging, but it's far from impossible. It's when you start talking about character "mastery" that things get dicey. Mortal Kombat defines mastery as using one character to win 100 matches, perform 100 fatalities (for the squeamish players out there, babalities work too), successfully land 150 X-Ray attacks, spill 10,000 pints of blood, and play as the character for 24 hours.
That's quite a commitment, and in order to 100% Mortal Kombat, you'll need to repeat the sequence 28 times. The "My Kung Fu is Stronger" achievement only unlocks when you've mastered the entire Mortal Kombat roster, a task that takes a whopping 672 hours. No wonder only about one half of one percent of the most dedicated Xbox and PlayStation users have managed it. The rest of us don't have that kind of time — or aren't willing to leave our consoles on for a month while Mortal Kombat idles in training mode.
It takes elite skills just to get past this Elite tutorial
Elite: Dangerous isn't just a big game. It's unfathomably huge. Using a combination of real-life scientific data and procedural generation, Elite: Dangerous recreates our entire galaxy. If you can see a star in the sky, you can boot up Elite, hop in your starship, and travel there. Just set aside some time for the trip. It might take you a while to arrive.
Fittingly, many of Elite: Dangerous' achievements aren't difficult, but they do require quite a bit of attention. That's why only 3% of players on the Xbox-centric site TrueAchievements have managed to reach the center of the galaxy, or why a mere 68 players have unlocked "Super Market Sweep," which is only given to players who hawk their wares at 500 separate markets.
However, one of Elite: Dangerous' most daunting tasks looks much easier. In order to earn the "Well Trained" achievement, all that you need to do is complete Elite: Dangerous' tutorial. Amazingly, only 4% of TrueAchievements players have done so.
What gives? Well, Elite's training section asks players to complete an "Advanced Combat Training" test, which pits you against ten waves of enemy spacecraft. For many, that's more trouble than it's worth. Both Reddit and the official Elite forums are filled with posts asking if the tutorial is supposed to be that hard, and the replies suggest that it is (one player says that, even with 890 hours logged in-game, he still can't beat it), and advise just moving on. From the looks of things, most people take that advice.
We're never going to Get Over It
There's hard, there's near-impossible, and then there's Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Not that we should've expect anything different, of course. Bennett Foddy is the twisted mind behind games like QWOP and GIRP, which translate simple actions like walking and running into Herculean tasks. Getting Over It, though, is something different. As a man crammed into a cauldron and armed with a blunt sledgehammer, you'll need to awkwardly swing, poke, and vault your way to the top of an abstract vertical structure. When you fall — and you will fall — there's nothing stopping you. A single mistake can easily cost you an hour's worth of progress.
Foddy cut his teeth on the ultra-punishing video games of the late '70s and early '80s, which were designed to suck all of the quarters from your wallet or make short games last a lot longer by ramping up the difficulty. The challenge is the whole point. It's not a cruel game. When you mess up, Foddy muses on the nature of failure via voice over and encourages you to continue. It's just hard. Really hard.
That's why so few people have managed to beat it, to say nothing of getting 100%. According to Steam, only 4% of Getting Over It players have reached the top of the mountain, earning the "Got Over It" achievement (even Foddy's only managed to make it a couple of times). If you want to get 100%, however, you need to scale Get Over It's ramshackle mountain 50 times. Not surprisingly, only 0.7% of players have done so.
The end is not as nigh as you think
Surprise! The new game from the guy who made Super Meat Boy, which ushered in the era of brutally difficult indie platformers, is supremely difficult. Who could've guessed?
The End Is Nigh hasn't caught on like Edmund McMillen's biggest hits, Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, but if you're familiar with McMillen's style, The End Is Nigh will make you feel right at home. It's deceptively simple — the graphics are stylish but uncomplicated, and every one of The End Is Nigh's 600-plus levels unfolds on a single screen — and it's got a weird sense of humor and tight and responsive controls. That's a good thing, because The End Is Nigh's platforming challenges will push your skills to the limit. If you don't execute moves with pixel-perfect precision, you're not going to proceed.
Understandably, completing The End Is Nigh is very, very rare. On Steam, The End Is Nigh's inaugural platform, merely 0.2% of players have earned the "DEAD GOD!" achievement, which unlocks when there's nothing left to do. Honestly, we're surprised that number isn't lower. If you want to complete The End Is Nigh, you need to beat the game while dying fewer than 200 times (even talented players often have death counts in the thousands by the time that they finish). You have to complete all of the ultra-challenging retro-inspired glitched "cartridge" levels without losing once. Trying to 100% The End Is Nigh (or, technically, 152% it) is a fool's errand — but with McMillen at the helm, we wouldn't expect anything less.
Success means venturing outside the Dungeons of Dredmor
If you want to earn 100% in Dungeons of Dredmor, you're going to have to put down the controller, log off of Steam, and spend some time interacting with actual people. Specific real people, in fact. While most of Dungeons of Dredmor's achievements can be earned by sitting down and grinding through the game's randomly generated dungeons, if you want to earn the Sewer Brew title, you'll need to hit up a bar and share a drink with one of the game's developers.
Originally, Sewer Brew required players to be at the right place at the right time. In 2011, Dungeons of Dredmor's developer, Gaslamp Games, held a special "drinking event" at the Penny Arcade expo. If you happened to miss out on the one-time only party, you were out of luck. Since then, however, a few players have managed to hit up Gaslamp employees for a brew or two, and received special codes that unlocked the achievement for their efforts.
Of course, these days, getting Sewer Brew is even harder than it used to be. Gaslamp Games closed its doors in late 2016, and its employees have scattered to the winds. These days, if you want to get Sewer Brew, the game's designers tell players to cheat (there's even a Steam Workshop add-on that'll do most of the work for you), although it doesn't seem like many people have followed their advice. Only 0.6% of Dredmor players have the Sewer Brew achievement unlocked.
World of Warcraft's grind just goes on and on and on
By design, World of Warcraft doesn't ever end — Blizzard has to keep that subscription money rolling in somehow — but that doesn't mean that you can't 100% it. See, World of Warcraft has its very own achievement system, which tracks all kinds of various activities that you can undertake in the world of Azeroth. It's not easy — there are a whole lot of achievements to unlock — but you can do it, and people have. An entire 11 of them, in fact (if you notice a point discrepancy, that's because players in the Alliance have one more achievement, the 10-point "Down Goes Van Rook", than their counterparts in the Horde).
One of those players goes by Xirev, and he hasn't been shy when it comes to talking about his experience. In a discussion with PC Gamer, Xirev says that he's poured somewhere around 850 to 900 days' worth of playtime into World of Warcraft. Along the way, he's killed 250,000 opponents in Warcraft's player versus player mode, won 5,000 of World of Warcraft's Pokémon-esque pet battles, and completed 10,000 daily quests. That doesn't count "Feats of Strength," either, which are primarily made up of achievements that you can no longer get and which don't count towards the game's completion percentage.
Xirev and his peers can't rest easy, though. World of Warcraft is ever-changing, and every expansion pack brings a new set of achievements to earn. As long as World of Warcraft keeps making money, Blizzard will keep adding achievements. 100%'ing Warcraft isn't something you do once. It's a task that never, ever ends.
For 25 years, trying to finish Doom 2 really was Hell on Earth
You think you finished Doom 2 years ago. After all, you've had time. The game's been out for a quarter of a century. Except, well, it turns out there's a secret that everybody missed. The Industrial Zone's "Secret No. 4" isn't mysterious in and of itself, of course. Players have been exploring it for years via Doom's "noclip" cheat, which lets players walk through walls. Entering the room via hacks isn't the same as unlocking it the "right" way, though, and that's what you'll need to do to get a legitimate Doom 2 100%. Over the past two-plus decades, most people assumed that Secret No. 4 was glitched and impossible to unlock. So, they ignored it.
Big mistake. As it turns out, the elusive secret is very achievable. You just have to think outside of the box. While it's impossible to trigger Secret No. 4's teleporter by stepping on it, YouTuber ZeroMaster discovered that letting enemy fire push you onto the teleporter works just fine, giving you that 100% completion percentage you crave. According to Doom co-creator John Romero, Zero Master is one of the only people who's managed to do it. The game is old enough that there are probably a few others, but given that the secret wasn't shared online for decades, we're guessing that number is very, very, very small.