Capcom's Ghosts 'n Goblins (1985 in arcades, 1986 on the NES) is a benchmark for difficulty. You're the knight Arthur, and a single hit strips your armor down to your boxer shorts. A second hit kills you.

The two-hit rule is doing more work than it looks. It means every enemy in the game is lethal in two touches, so you're never trading damage, only avoiding it. Combine that with enemies that spawn from both sides continuously and a jump arc you cannot alter once you've left the ground, and you get a game where every single screen has to be solved rather than survived. Arthur's jump is the real antagonist: commit to it and you are a passenger until you land.

Your weapons are the other half of the puzzle, and most of them are traps. The lance you start with is fine. The torch lobs in an arc and burns where it lands, which is either excellent or useless depending on the room. The shield bounces off walls. And picking up a new weapon is not optional, so walking over the wrong one at the wrong moment can end a run that was going well.

Then the final insult. Beat the game and it informs you that this was a trap devised by Satan, and sends you back to the beginning to do the whole thing again, harder, with the real ending waiting at the end of the second loop. In an arcade that's a quarter-farming mechanic. On a home cartridge it's just cruelty.

It should be infuriating, and it is, but the controls are precise and the atmosphere is grim and excellent, so we kept coming back to die one more time. A masterclass in making you earn every single screen, and the direct ancestor of Capcom's Ghouls 'n Ghosts and every hard-but-fair argument since.