Most difficult levels in existence?

[jblewis]

I'd say that CCLP2 is far more guilty of "fake difficulty" than CCLP3. There are a few levels in CCLP3 that I'm not fond of, but overall it's quite a fine set.

^ This. I can at least appreciate a level like "You Can't Teach an Old Frog New Tricks" because I figured out almost all of it unassisted (with the exception of one room) and almost entirely on pure logic. The challenges in the level felt in no way needless. There was only one aspect of the level for which I had to utilize guesswork, for which I later discovered that the guesswork was completely unnecessary, and I simply missed an important clue. So once I was done, the playing experience was quite satisfactory. I felt similarly about most of the rest of CCLP3.

On the other hand, a level like "Checkerboard I" is difficult because of guesswork - providing that the player isn't consulting a map. There's no reason for the blue walls to be in this level at all; they just make the level more needlessly difficult. There's no real learning or actual thinking in which the player has to take part during a failed attempt in order to solve the level on future attempts; it's merely, "Oh, so this wall is fake, so I guess I have to go through there." The same can be said about a level like "Chip Search" or a level like "Warehouse II" that could've been condensed into a smaller space with the needlessly long passages and turns eliminated while retaining the same basic challenge.