Top 20 Hardest PlayStation Trophies

“Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag” (2013)

If you really want to annoy trophy hunters, you make RNG elements tied to trophies. This is why so many folks skipped out on the Platinum for “Black Flag” as the ‘Sharing Is Caring’ trophy tasks you with sharing every discovery in the game with your friends at least once. And yes, that does mean EVERYTHING. Every convoy, every white whale, and every randomly generated Social Chest counts towards this trophy. Known trophy guide writers have taken years to nail down every single possible spawn point for these collectibles, so if you really need to pop this trophy, it’s best to look up a guide beforehand so you can keep tabs on where you’ve been.

“Sniper Elite III” (2014)

For the trophy called ‘A Shot in the Dark,’ “Sniper Elite III” gets a little too meticulous for some players to tolerate. The description simply reads, “Complete all the long shots”. However, the game never signifies the location of said long shots. That said, unless you have some godlike senses, you are practically required to look up a guide just to figure out where these locations are. Not only that, but these long shots are required for a 100% completion rating, which is how you pop the ‘Dedicated Soldier’ trophy. So, you’ll need to conquer all eight locations regardless.

“The Last of Us Remastered” (2014)

Grounded Mode has garnered itself a bit of an infamous reputation on account of how much hindrance is imposed on the player. It isn’t just that enemies are super aggressive and nothing else. Your HUD is taken away, resources are incredibly scarce, and Joel’s Listen Mode is deactivated, making it much harder to sneak around enemies. Though some will praise and brag about this difficulty being “the real way to play”, there isn’t much fun if you’re ramming your head into a wall, is there?

“Team Sonic Racing” (2019)

“Team Sonic Racing’s” biggest problem is how it requires players to race in a very specific way and fails to adjust for solo players when trying to beat certain campaign challenges. The ‘Can You Feel the Sunshine?’ trophy requires you to obtain every Star in the aforementioned campaign, Team Adventure mode. Again, not every mission is properly adjusted to your needs if you’re tackling all of these missions solo. So, you’re basically required to play with a friend and hope they are good at racing games.

“Killzone: Shadow Fall” (2013)

Situational trophies are never fun, hence why we’re putting “Killzone: Shadow Fall” on this list. The ‘Outgunned’ trophy demands that you take down six Helghasts with headshots within one use of adrenaline rush. Problem is that there is rarely ever a fight where more than six Helghasts are in the same area. There are really only two opportunities for you to pop this: once in Chapter Five’s “Make Him Pay” section and in Chapter Nine. Even then, you better have honed in your FPS skills to pop this trophy in record time.

“Twisted Metal” (2012)

Even under the Normal difficulty, 2012’s “Twisted Metal” can be very challenging. So, imagine playing this on Twisted difficulty. Yeah, it is absolutely grueling. But if you want to go for the ‘Twisted Gold’ trophy, you will need to beat the campaign under Twisted difficulty and earn the gold medal on EVERY mission. Considering some levels don’t give you a garage to swap out vehicles, this is quite the tall order for trophy hunters. But with the Platinum being unobtainable due to servers having long since shut down, why would you want to anyway?

“Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2: Grand Prix” (2020)

Now, this might sound ridiculous. “It’s a kids game. There’s nothing hard here! Git gud, scrub!” Those would be the words from players who didn’t give “Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2” more than ten minutes let alone a full playthrough of every cup. See, the ‘Night of a Thousand Stars’ trophy requires you get Gold Stars on every cup under every difficulty. That’s including the hidden Insane difficulty, which is just a total assault; you can be at the top of your game and the AI will just rubberband to victory and defy whatever stats are tied to their builds. Only 0.3% of players have nabbed the trophy, and many have quit the journey out of frustration.

“Overwatch” (2016)

Of course all of the “Overwatch” trophies are hard to get…because you can’t play it anymore!! HA! In all seriousness, most of “Overwatch’s” trophies were hard because they usually required using Ultimates and/or passive abilities at their highest potential. To get them all, that meant getting good with the entire roster. For Lucio, you had to eliminate three opponents while riding along the walls without dying. If you killed an enemy while Lucio’s skates were not attached to a wall, it wouldn’t count. Look, if you no-life’d “Titanfall 2”, maybe this wasn’t a big deal for you. For the rest of us, it was impossible.

“Dead By Daylight” (2016)

The problem with some of “Dead By Daylight’s” trophies is that they are almost entirely situational. Case in point, ‘The Key to Escape’ trophy. The description makes it sound simple - use a Key to escape through the Hatch in a public match. What’s so complicated about that? Well, for starters, in order for the Hatch to spawn in the first place, you need to be the last Survivor standing. The Hatch automatically spawns opened, so escaping through it immediately won’t pop the trophy. You need to let the Killer close it themselves and pray they don’t find you before you go opening it again. And if the Killer equipped Franklin’s Demise and hit you before the Hatch spawned, well, good luck recovering your Key.

“God of War HD” (2007)

The Greek era “God of War” games featured combat challenges that have long been a source of rage for fans. But the Challenge of the Gods from the HD re-release of the original “God of War” is the most tormenting. It isn’t even the fluctuating difficulty that’s the problem - it’s the tenth and final challenge. You have to elevate a tiny platform by killing off Cerberus dogs while two invincible Satyrs relentlessly attack you. It’s fairly easy for the Satyrs to knock you off the platform or disrupt your combos. It is almost entirely dependent on finding an attack to spam that works for you. Only a little more than four percent of players have conquered Challenge of the Gods (on PS3, anyways).

“Rogue Legacy” (2013)

While limiting deaths can certainly be a cool challenge, this is just cruel difficulty cranking. Named after the fear of death itself, this trophy in the already demanding side-scroller has definitely burned a few fans over the years. Requiring you to beat the game with 15 deaths or less, the challenge would already seem high for most gamers. But what makes this trophy particularly evil is the fact that dying is the only way to upgrade your character, making the game even harder to beat and forcing potentially strategic deaths just to beat a game that normally averages around 100 deaths per normal run-through.

“Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor” (2014)

So many grueling trophies demand the utmost skill from players but the ones that demand luck are more than just a little cheeky. The challenge for this Tolkien-inspired trophy is to liberate 30 slaves in under 180 seconds, all while riding a Caragor who will not be happy about it. While the actual skill required to defeat the enemies holding the slaves is fairly minimal, especially with the Caragor's attacks, the time constraint definitely ramps things up. But the catch here is that slaves are few and far between making the trophy a matter of scouting and time management rather than player skill.

“Bloodborne” (2015)

Collectibles have definitely become a nuisance in games lately, but leave it to From Software to make that punishing too. Finally giving a little bit of utility to tedious collection fests, you can be forgiven for thinking getting every weapon in the game would've been at the very least a straightforward affair. Given the copious amounts of money, time and even luck with dungeon layouts to score some of the easily missable weapons later in the game, the potential benefits to getting these items seems negligible, especially on top of the already devastating gameplay.

“Batman: Arkham Knight” (2015)

When one challenge isn't hard enough, just stack them on top of each other. The latest instalment in the Arkham series kept the intense but solid combat going while demanding even more from players because of it. To earn this monster of a trophy players have to beat Killer Croc, but only after they've earned a 300 times multiplier or one million points from fighting the room of goons before him. While either challenge is rough on its own, the stress of landing both is a painful feat, especially when your multiplier can be taken away from you at any moment by a stray goon who gets lucky.

“Ultra Street Fighter IV” (2014)

Even though most players decide to main one character in fighting games, this trophy will have you mastering all of them. Forcing players to explore the entire roster, this trophy requires you to beat all 24 challenges for each of the 35 characters making it both a slog and true struggle to earn the trophy. Between the mounting difficulty and having to adjust to each character after mastering one, this was a test of mental fortitude as much as skill. Importing this trophy over from the game's previous iteration, they made players suffer once more in their quest for platinum.

“Star Wars: Battlefront” (2015)

Not focusing on your development on single-player is one thing, but forcing players into your shoe-horned award mode, that’s a whole other story. Entering a new level of frustration, this trophy requires you to earn all stars on each single-player mission on the Master difficulty. While this would be a pretty standard grind in most games, the difficulty ramps up so dramatically that it's hard to keep pace here, making the process turn from manageable to unfair almost instantly. Along with the less-than-solid controls and level design, it required so much time and effort that it has a 0.1 per cent achieved rate among the community.

“Injustice: Gods Among Us” (2013)

Fighting games really seem to enjoy testing their fans with the challenge modes. Giving a twist on Street Fighter's trophy this game forced players to beat every challenge of the battle mode with one extra hard mission to make the game worthy of its title. With enough hard challenges along the way to make this trophy a difficult enough trudge as is, the hardest challenge took things in an interesting direction by forcing players to fight the entire roster. The conceit however was running this gauntlet on a single health bar, turning an interesting concept into a maddening reality.

“Trials Fusion” (2014)

You know you're in for some trouble when they call the game Trials. A hard enough game in its own right, the puzzle racer gave a demanding but often fun and well-built grind to beat the whole game, but the layers they included to fully complete the game were downright sadistic. Completing an increasingly unnerving list of tasks, the trophy finds players completing all challenges and puzzles for each level requiring steady thumbs and keen eyes along the way. Things get tough however with the no-fail challenges and even an invisible-bike mode, giving even the best players a run for their money.

“Surgeon Simulator” (2013)

Not too many trophies are this much harder with a controller. Making players embrace the sloppy controls wholeheartedly this trophy forces players to both work against and with the intentionally clunky design of the game to perform an eye transplant in under two minutes and ten seconds, all while in a speeding and bumpy ambulance. All the worse thanks to the inaccuracy while using a controller, this trophy's small focal points made the joystick twitching a painful exercise made even worse by the unorthodox methods you need to conceive just to constantly stay ahead of the stress-inducing time limit.

“Titan Souls” (2015)

Even if you want to take your rough game to the next level, it still needs to be fair, right? For a game that's often been called a 2D Dark Souls, you'd think the developers would have considered the story mode enough challenge in and of itself. But unfortunately thanks to the world of trophies, players are treated to this gem that not only has you dealing with the infamous one-hit death, but puts you back at the beginning of the game instead of a checkpoint. If that wasn't enough punishment they also gave each of the bosses extra moves so you have even more patterns to memorize. Fun.

Which of these trophies did you find the hardest? Was there one we missed? Let us know down in the comments and subscribe for more gaming lists everyday.