That One Boss / Survival Horror

• Alone in the Dark:
  • Li Tung in the third game. He moves and attacks much faster than Carnby can, and can close the distance very quickly and jump-kick you from halfway across the room you fight him in. Beating him essentially requires running back and forth, popping off Winchester shots whenever you get the chance.
  • Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare:
    • The Procuraptor in the library can take a lot of damage, which forces you to use the rocket launcher. Even then, you can't damage it in its normal state, but shooting it with any weapon (even the revolver) will cause it to enter a vulnerable state during a few second where you can actually damage it. However, since this is not obvious, you can waste a lot of rockets by using them during the first state. If you didn't find enough rockets, expect a very long fight as you'll run out of them and have to resort to the shotgun.
    • Alan Morton. A brutal Lightning Bruiser with no clear attack pattern (thank goodness he can only attack at close range). And to top it off, he's a Puzzle Boss (your weapons can only knock him out for a while). You have to knock him out and find the right door which will lead you to a magical spear that kills him with one hit. And if you reach a door while he's up, he'll teleport and slam you down. But once you know the right door...
• The Evil Within: Most of the bosses are really tough. While they are praised for their designs and implications to what they are, many players don't like them for being Damage Sponges, having obscure weaknesses, and having one-hit kill attacks that are hard to avoid.
  • The Sentinel in particular can be a real son of a bitch. Although fought in a brightly lit and fairly open area, its speed and size make it nearly impossible to dodge its charge attacks. Unlike the previous battle with Neun and Zehn, resources to replenish your stocks are almost nonexistent, so if the player is low on health or ammunition, it can be next to impossible to defeat the boss (he is, thankfully, skippable).
  • Laura in Chapter 10 is a hatefully sadistic Puzzle Boss. She has a damage threshold set so high as to be practically unkillable, is lightning-fast, can Flash Step toward you while you're trying to aim at her or the valves to need to shoot, and uses her extremely long reach to trap you in a One-Hit Kill that she does constantly. Thanks to that, no amount of weapon or ability upgrades can make her any less miserable to deal with, even on the easiest difficulty. And this level of challenge is just to run away from her! Laura can be killed if you're sufficiently powerful, quick on the draw and damn lucky, but to give you an idea of what a travail that is to do, only a single-digit percentage of players have gotten the trophy/achievement for it.
  • Alpha Amaglam in Chapter ten for all the reasons listed at the beginning of this entry, and on top of that, you fight him in an incredibly punishing Boss Arena where it is very easy to get boxed in.
  • The encounter with the Spotlight creature at the end of "The Assignment" Chapter 1. You need to stay out of its sight for a lengthy period of time while it aggressively stalks you throughout a relatively small chamber. Spotlight is a lot more perceptive compared to the Haunted you've been sneaking past up until now, able to detect you instantly if even the tiniest sliver of your form is caught in its beam, and both very fast and capable of slowing you down by shining its light on you. Death is all but guaranteed if Kidman is spotted here, and certain passageways fill with electrical arcs as the power comes back on, making it even harder to avoid getting eaten.
• The Evil Within 2:
  • For being the first real boss of the game, Stefano can be a pain on your first run. He’s fought in a gallery where there’s not a lot of room to move and is made even smaller by his huge monster that he has observing the fight. It will randomly smack the ground, limiting where you can go and taking off a huge amount of health. As for Stefano himself, he plants exploding cubes around the arena and can freeze you with his camera to make you a sitting duck. Not to mention that he teleports constantly and has a difficult-to-dodge charge attack that wrecks your health. Hope you got some upgrades in, or you’ll be in for one nasty fight.
  • O'Neal as the first Harbinger you face is an incredibly difficult boss. Not only is he a Damage-Sponge Boss that can take dozens of shots to the head even on a lower difficulty but he has a long reaching flamethrower that also results in the arena catching fire. You can use sprinklers to put out the flames but he is methodical in searching the small area you're trapped in. He also sports an incredibly potent melee attack if you get too close.
  • Myra is not very easy either (though fitting considering they're the final boss). While their attacks are fairly easy to dodge, it's undermined by the fact that they move pretty quickly, take a lot of ammo to kill, and said attacks pack quite a punch. They also occasionally release a group of spider-like creatures to attack you, which are frustrating when trying to avoid/kill them while battling.
• Fatal Frame
  • Fatal Frame II:
    • The second battle with the Kiryu Twins. One of them is a possessed doll and will not take any damage from your camera and there's no proper indication which of them is the invulnerable doll and which the spirit you need to actually fight. So you're already hesitant to use your better film here, in fear of wasting it. They also tend to attack from opposite sides, forcing you to relocate and try to get both in one shot. And that's the problem with all of their battles, but the second one is the worst because it takes place in the Doll Room. This room is pretty small, because it's filled with dolls and dollstands, so you have less room to evade them and can easily get jumped.
    • Sae. Majority of the time, she is surrounded by a red mist that makes it very difficult for your camera to focus on and damage her and she only has short moments without the mist, that allow you to properly attack her. The main issue is her apparently random AI and tendency to teleport around; she can easily teleport right in front of you and get a good hit in. Fortunately, she is the only Final Boss without a One-Hit Kill... unless the difficulty is set to Nightmare and the player is forced to do a No Damage Run against her.
  • Fatal Frame III: Reika. Contrary to Kirie and the Kusabi from the first and second game, who had One-Hit Kills but were rather slow and had easy to read movements, Reika is the complete opposite. She likes to flit around the field and fly up into the air, which is already difficult to see on its own and good luck trying to avoid her dive-bombing onto you. Her own One-Hit Kill involves her appearing at some random location near you. And if you aren't looking clearly away from her at this point, she will laugh at your health bar depleting.
  • Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse: The late battles against the Utsuwa (Vessel) and Kanades (Accompanists). The Utsuwa is on her own, but she likes to teleport frequently and attack randomly. So unless you get the Evade function down pat, she'll be hell to fight. The Kanades are worse, though. There are five of them and they team up well; four of them are likely to remain in your field of vision and distract you long enough, so the fifth one can easily attack you from below.
• Resident Evil 0 has the notoriously hated bane of no-save playthroughs, the Giant Bat in the church. It spends most of its time fluttering erratically around, which makes it hard to hit — especially with the twin hassles of RE0's simplistic aiming system and fixed camera angles. After it takes a few hits, it begins spawning countless smaller bats, which interfere with your ability to aim at the creature by forcing your auto-aim to lock onto them instead. They can also get in the way of your shots, and will whittle down your health by biting you themselves. There was a glitch where, if you ran into the save room after the boss fight was triggered, the giant bat would die when you returned to the church, but this was removed in the HD remake of the game.
• Resident Evil 3 (Remake): Nemesis's final form, especially on Nightmare difficulty or higher. He has an incredibly cheap ground pound attack that has to be dodged at just the right moment, or else it will stunlock Jill while he hits her two more times, automatically killing her. There's absolutely no hope to survive if he hits you the first time, as the second hits can't be dodged however much you try.
• In Resident Evil 4, you will eventually come across a fight with two El Gigante enemies. It's possible to drop one into a pool of lava, but this is also a trap: As long as said Gigante is thrashing around in the lava, it will try to grab Leon, killing him instantly. Unlike previous encounters, there is nothing in the arena to help the player, forcing you to do your best to avoid the monster's highly damaging attacks while slowly whittling away its health. This encounter is likely the best area to use that Rocket Launcher you got from the display case inside Salazar's Castle as it not only gets rid of one of them instantly, but also stuns the other for some time, giving you ample time to switch to another suitable weapon to start dealing with the now-lone El Gigante.
  • The fight against Verdugo in the sewers is incredibly difficult, but the Resident Evil 4 (Remake) makes it far harder by removing all of the Quick Time Events that would have allowed you to dodge most of his attacks. Now, you have to rely on positioning and luck. Additionally, when you drop the liquid-nitrogen tanks in the original, a cutscene plays, and thus Verdugo cannot hit you. In the remake, hitting the button to activate the nitrogen shower is done in real time, so you can take a nice claw to the skull while it activates. This boss also cannot die during the first phase of the fight. Even if you strike it with a rocket launcher, the boss will retreat and still attack you in the remainder of the hallway when the elevator starts up. This wasn't true in the original where you could kill him right away with a single rocket.
• In Silent Hill 2, the part at the end of Brookhaven where you have to escape from Pyramid Head becomes this on hard mode. On other difficulties it's so easy that it barely qualifies as a boss, as you can just run to the elevator while he's busy beating up Maria. But now, he kills her in just 3 hits and is way too fast for her to outrun - note that as soon as Pyramid Head goes offscreen, he'll accelerate to impossible speeds. This leaves you with 2 strategies, both extremely counterintuitive: run away at full speed and nail a perfect shotgun blast through a fence to slow him down, without hitting Maria who's directly in the line of fire; or, precisely wedge yourself between him and Maria and whack him a bunch, then run a short distance and repeat this over and over again. This is of course assuming Maria cooperates at all - If only she was clever enough to just run away on her own while you have him stuck against you. What really rubs salt in the wound is just how pointless it is, as she gets killed in the cutscene mere seconds later.
• Silent Hill 3's final boss can be a cruel trap for players who were too liberal with their item usage, especially on hard - not only can the rest of the game be just easy enough to lull you into a false sense of security, but there's a chance that the final "dungeon" will have almost zero resources to get you ready for it, simply because the dynamic difficulty decides that it doesn't like you. As for the boss herself, she alternates between near-instant melee attacks and homing fire waves depending on your distance, has absolutely titanic health, and on hard mode gains a massive speed boost once she's lost a portion of it, such that attacking from close range is just asking to get half your life slapped out of you. She also constantly retreats to an invincible state, requiring you to either hit her a bunch more or dodge her attacks for a while before she comes back out of it. All told, if you didn't save enough bullets to chip through most of her health, doing the job with melee weapons is an exercise in misery, where you have to make many, many flawless moves over a very long period of time. Plus, hard mode and up makes your most damaging weapon, the SMG, completely ineffective as it knocks her out of her vulnerable state almost instantly. The last kicker is that the final bosses of the previous games have a mercy feature, where being out of ammo causes them to eventually die on their own if you survive for a few minutes... but there's no such kindness here.

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