Some games take the 'overcoming adversity' thing and crank it so hard the dial falls off, creating brutally difficult game modes for only the seriously skilful or wilfully masochistic. Here are eight of the hardest modes that we will never, ever attempt, let alone finish. Subscribe for a list every Thursday on Outside Xbox: http://www.tinyurl.com/SubToOxbox

These merciless modes include The Evil Within's top difficulty setting, Akumu.

We thought The Evil Within was pretty difficult, which is why we were somewhat taken aback to discover that there are two whole levels above the game's regular Survival difficulty: namely Nightmare and Akumu.

As you may have guessed from the name, Nightmare is no walk in the barbed-wire covered park. Akumu, on the other hand, is Japanese for Nightmare and is even harder than that, in that if you take so much as a single hit from anything, you die instantly.

Even less forgiving is Doom's Ultra Nightmare mode, which is so difficult that no one who actually worked on the game could complete it.

The premise of Ultra Nightmare is simple: you take regular Nightmare mode which is, as the name implies, an absolute nightmare, then apply permadeath to it - so the second you die, you're booted back to the start of the game and your save is erased.

Inspect those extreme difficulty levels in the video above, along with Civilisation's Deity setting, Dead Space's Hardcore mode, and the ominously titled Ethan Must Die mode in Resident Evil 7.

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