That One Level / RollerCoaster Tycoon

Micro Park: Thirteen-by-thirteen^note minus three; can't build over that entrance! tiles of fun for the family and frustration for the player!

RollerCoaster Tycoon has its share of incredibly difficult and frustrating levels, some of which have received infamy within the community.

---

RollerCoaster Tycoon

• For first-timers, Evergreen Gardens — which is in the starting batch of scenarios in the original game and Classic — can be very tough. The level is a very large and beautiful park that's completely empty, meaning you'll have to make the park one section at a time unless if you want guests to get lost and complain. "No Entry" signs might deter guests, but they don't deter staff, meaning that if your Mechanic isn't patrolling a particular ride, they'll be on the other side of the park when a ride breaks down (the more effective solution is to demolish the path outright, denying access to everyone; just be sure to restore any deleted paths when you intend to enable access to that region again).
• Dinky/Pokey Park may prove to be challenging as it's the first park to have very little space, so amassing $10,000 in park value requires very good space management. Fortunately, you can buy extra land to give yourself more space to work with, but you still have the hassle of building to the land across the road in the first place.
• Mothball/Mystic Mountain. You have very little space, the terrain is horribly uneven, the loan caps out at $15k and it rains a lot. 800 guests might not seem like a lot, but when it's hard to bring in money and get your guests to go on the rides, you'll be happy to afford a Shuttle Loop. It's also one of the few smaller maps where purchasing new land would actually be a helpful tactic. However, it turns out that it was made expensive for this mission with each tile costing a hefty $90.
• Lightning Peaks can be a bit tricky to beat due to the uneven layout of the terrain. It's also very easy for guests to get lost due to this too, considering a lot of them don't really use transport rides for their intended purpose.
• Rainbow Valley doesn't have a difficult goal, only requiring 1000 guests in 4 years. The hard part is the fact that this park bans tree removal and landscape changes, meaning that trees suddenly become your biggest nightmare and building coasters and paths can be an utter pain. Thankfully, there are some cliffs that you can use to go underground and avoid the trees.

Corkscrew Follies/Added Attractions

• Three Monkeys Park in of itself isn't a difficult scenario; it has a triple roller coaster that makes a lot of money, a decent layout, and selection of rides. The key word is rides; the scenario has a bit of a trap when it comes to stalls, as it doesn't start off with access to drinks, which take a long time to research for even when dedicating all research to stalls. Fail to consider this, and your guests will quickly complain of thirst.
• Jolly Jungle is a downplayed example. The objective itself isn't too difficult and there's plenty of time to achieve it (4 years), and the park is pretty large. The biggest catch here is the sheer amount of trees and foliage in the park, constantly getting in the way of construction. Better find a way around them, or start getting used to right-clicking! Alas, the first game lacks the "Remove Scenery" tool from the second game that could help immensely with removing these trees en-masse.
• Sprightly Park. You start with $250,000 of debt, which means you will lose over $400 every month due to the huge loan. And there's more: The rides are around 28 to 42 years old, meaning that they are much more prone to breakdowns. The only thing that will save you from the horrendous debt is the entry fee (thankfully in RCT Classic, this is a Pay-to-Enter park) of the park, since the rides are old enough that you can't charge for them at all. Good thing that this isn't in Loopy Landscapes (which prevents you from charging for park entry). Also, since this is an "old-fashioned" type of park, you don't get nearly the selection of researchable rides that most parks give you, similar to Woodworm Park (mentioned below), with only a few thrill rides and no fancy roller coasters. Better brush up on your skills with the Wooden Twister and Mine Train, because they are the only "large" coasters you get.
• Harmonic Hills is the sequel to Rainbow Valley and gives you a tree-covered area with landscaping and tree removal banned, but with the added restriction of being unable to build above said trees due to height regulations. Your ride selection is among the worst in the series; RCT Classic adds insult to injury and gives you an Air Powered Vertical Coaster at the start of the scenario, as well as other useless attractions like the Big Wheel, Swinging Inverter Ship and Launched Freefall, which you literally can't build anywhere because of the height restrictions. You don't even start with food or drinks, and with the non-removable trees dotted around everywhere and in just the wrong places, trying to build anything there (let alone a good custom coaster) will infuriate even the most dedicated Environmentalist to the point where they'll suddenly become an advocate for clearcutting. Have fun fitting 1,200 guests in there.
• Swamp Cove doesn't have a too difficult goal, requiring 1,600 guests in 3 years and the park already provides you with two good coasters already drawing in guests, but is infamous due to not researching a drinks stall until March, Year 2, and that's assuming you have been researching on maximum funding on shops and stalls since the very start. Hope you like seeing your guests become thirsty, because there's nothing you can do about it until you finally unlock that drinks stall.
• Adrenaline Heights. While you aren't literally restricted to roller coasters in terms of ride choice, all the guests have high intensity preferences, often above 9, making this bit of leeway redundant. You may as well only build roller coasters.
• This expansion has a rather nasty objective in Fiasco Forest; having to fix up a park that is pre-built to be an absolute disaster. The catch that makes this a difficult set-up is that you only get ONE YEAR to get all the flaws fixed in addition to getting 900 people in your park. There is an easy work around to just remake the park entirely from scratch, but even then, you're still racing against the clock to get 900 people in your park within just one year. Marketing is unavailable, so you can't just cheese the objective that way.
• Pickle Park, another scenario that blocks out Marketing, isn't much better; while you have more time to build the park, you'll have to start from scratch, and the guest requirement is higher.
• Urban Park, the penultimate scenario, is tiny, literally the size of someone's back yard, and there is no way you're fitting 1000 guests inside it. You're basically forced to buy new land/construction rights through the nearby town, which then becomes a juggling act of getting enough money and making sure the layout isn't too confusing.

Loopy Landscapes

• Woodworm Park is no slouch. In this park, you are allowed to build only the older-style rides. That means no steel, steel twister, or vertical roller coasters; no "shuttle" roller coasters; only three thrill rides even after all research is done... and you must have 1600 guests in your park in 3 years. To add insult to injury, the terrain is horrible and the weather is rainy. Unless you've had a lot of practice making older-style rides, this one will be troublesome. It's not even that far into the scenario list, yet it is more difficult than most of the ones following it (the below-mentioned Micro Park aside).
• Octagon Park hammers in the reality that some open-ended scenarios are open-ended for a reason. Building 10 roller coasters that have a 7.00 excitement rating and are at least 3,937ft/1,200m is no small feat and it doesn't help that amassing the funds for just one qualifying roller coaster is frustrating, let alone ten of them in one go.
• Pleasure Island, the park directly after Octagon Park, is just as bad. It has the "Ten Roller Coasters" goal, but the Excitement Rating is 6.00 and there is no minimum length goal. The difficulty? The island is a very long and thin strip of land, and fitting in a lot of roller coasters at the end can be very painful. And the cherry? The park rating is harder to increase, meaning you'll need those 6.00 Excitement Ratings.
• Southern Sands, hoo boy. You get two really good roller coasters, a nice transport ride, tons of flat space and a nice pathing system. The problem? You get the double whammy of having a harder time getting guests and increasing the park rating on top of the goal of 2,300 guests in 4 years, the highest outside of infinite money parks and the "Real" Parks in the first game. If you're not judicious about cycling guests in and out, keeping the ride tickets cheap and getting high excitement ratings on your rides, the guest count will stop growing, advertising and awards be damned.
• If you're not very good at designing effective compact roller coasters that aren't Wild Mouse coasters, then you'll really hate Tiny Towers. You're given really small space to finish five roller coasters that are conventionally giants (especially the Twister and Wooden Roller Coaster) with at least a 6.40 excitement rating on each one. If you decide to place flat rides, you have to be especially careful, as every square will count. At least it's bigger than Micro Park, but that's not saying much.
• Nevermore Park is the second and last "Build 10 Roller Coasters with a 7.00 Excitement Rating and a minimum length" park in Loopy Landscapes. Unlike its brother, it gives you a free roller coaster... but there are many problems with this coaster. It has an extremely high nausea rating (meaning it can dirty your park very fast), it is a transportation ride that takes guests through four areas of the park (at the beginning, you'll need to focus on only certain areas of the park. This causes guests to get lost in the park very fast), and it can be very infuriating to deal with at the beginning of the scenario. Fortunately, once you've gotten a more developed park, the whole "transportation system" deal isn't too bad. Then you just have to deal with the time-consuming process of building 9 more coasters at least 4,537 feet or 1,400 meters long, which is tough enough in itself.
• Micro Park is the last stage in the Loopy Landscapes set and is just like Dinky Park, but with 13x13 for land and no extra land for expansion. The goal is focused around park value, where you build things. See where this is going? It's slightly more tolerable in Open and Classic, where it's easier to put rides, but it can still be a headache.
• The "Real" Parks have the highest guest quotas in the first game, outside of infinite money scenarios, but with such established parks already (based on real life parks, hence the "Real" Parks moniker), you shouldn't have too much trouble getting the required guests. The real difficulty of these parks is the abnormally high loans that they start with ($4,770,000 for Alton Towers, $4,000,000 for Heide-Park and $2,000,000 for Blackpool Pleasure Beach), the highest in the franchise, which are impossible to pay off with the $10,000 you start with, meaning you'll be stuck with high loan interest payments for a while.

RollerCoaster Tycoon 2

• Amity Airfield and (to an extent) Fungus Woods are regarded as difficult, especially for their placements, for one particular reason - their absurdly high guest count requirement in four years. Amity Airfield requires 3,000 guests in four years, while Fungus Woods requires 2,500. Fortunately for both parks, they have a giant amount of space that you can work with.
  • For Amity Airfield, you start off with a lot of unnecessary paths and buildings (unless if you want lost guests) you can get rid of so you can get a lot of money at the start, but even then, you need to also use the time to start bringing guests in and making sure you have a consistent flow. A lot of the rides you have available are also air-themed, meaning that the roller coasters that you'll be building are generally very expensive along with providing rather high nausea ratings. You're gonna have to hire a ton of Handymen to make sure the paths are clean, as vomit is a very common concern here. You will also have to make sure that you constantly advertise too along with making sure that guests stay in. It's a pay-to-enter park, so Cash Machines will be really helpful here.
  • Fungus Woods is 500 short, but the park itself gives you more of a disadvantage. Unlike Amity Airfield where you have a lot of paths you can sell, Fungus Woods has the opposite. It is full of trees, meaning that every time you try to construct something, you'll be paying a lot of money. Like Amity Airfield, the ride choices are limited... but you have much less variety, as you can only work with old-fashion rides, similar to Woodworm Park, meaning no steel roller coasters and no thrill rides, full stop.
• Gravity Gardens. You have to pay off a loan and get a certain park value, both of which are rather high. However, you only get roller coasters to build, which are high-profit but high-cost by design: no Boring, but Practical flat rides to maintain the bottom line. With the park being pay-to-enter, it's too easy to get stuck in a loop of having to build a new ride cause the value of your other rides fell again and by the time you have enough money to build another one, the values of the others dropped. It's considered one of the hardest scenarios in RCT2 for a reason.
• Extreme Heights has the highest guest count requirement out of all the official scenarios, requiring a staggering 4,500 guests in the park at any one time, while not letting the park rating drop below 700. The scenario takes place in mountainous terrain, making building rides difficult. Luckily, the scenario has infinite money, so you don't have to worry about finances at all. Sounds good, right? Well, scenarios with infinite money also prohibit advertisements, so you can't use those to boost your guest count. You need to build enough rides to attract those 4,500 guests organically, which will take a long time. To make things worse, every guest prefers high intensity rides, which will take even longer to design.
• Ghost Town, much like Octagon Park before it, really hammers in the reality that some open-ended scenarios are open-ended for a reason. Yet again, you have to build 10 roller coasters that have at least a 7.00 excitement rating and a minimum length of 3,937ft/1,200m and amassing the funds to build a qualifying coaster is frustrating, not to mention the fact that you have less space than you did in Octagon Park.
• Rainbow Summit is similar to Harmonic Hills in Corkscrew Follies, having the "can't build above tree height" gimmick. Thankfully though, you have a much better ride selection to start with and you can remove trees and manipulate land so you can build underground, but even that can be rather pricy. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Nowhere in the actual description does it mention that advertising is forbidden, making it similar to Pickle Park in terms of advertising - and you need those 2,500 guests organically by the end of Year 4. The park gives you an efficient Wooden Roller Coaster to start with, but the Chairlift can actually cause you more trouble than it's worth.
• The Build Your Own Six Flags parks (sans the one that isn't a blank version of the "Real" Parks) aren't necessarily difficult, but they are long, being 5 or even 6 years per park, meaning that unless you're playing OpenRCT2 or Classic, which have a fast forward feature, you're gonna be playing these scenarios for a long while, which is especially redundant if you've already beaten the established versions in the "Real" Parks tab.
  • Build Your Own Six Flags Magic Mountain deserves special mention, as that is the only one that has a different objective than getting a certain amount of guests, with you instead having to repay a $50,000 loan and achieve a park value of $700,000, the largest park value goal in the game. Unlike the "Real" Parks version, you can't cheese this park by selling a roller coaster and then repaying the loan before the park value updates; you have to get that park value naturally, which of course takes a long time.

Wacky Worlds and Time Twister

• Inca Lost City (Wacky Worlds) is another one that should be mentioned. You have to get 1500 guests without letting your park rating drop below 700. While that sounds easy enough, the park has an implicit difficulty setting — making it harder to gain the park rating you desperately need to stay open — as well as starting you with absolutely nothing, making it a particularly nasty beginner's trap. You will probably have to restart the first two months multiple times just to properly get started.
• Japanese Coastal Reclaim (Wacky Worlds) definitely deserves its expert difficulty moniker. First, it's a park entrance fee park, which means that you have to get more guests in to make money. The problem is that your park has no space, an awful ride selection, and a height restriction added on to the fact that you have too many guests for your current park to sustain. You will need to have full knowledge of game mechanics just to have a chance. At least you are given a lot of time to complete your objective, or go into debt.
• The last very difficult scenario here is Rainforest Plateau (Wacky Worlds). The space is limited and you cannot buy more land. The park shape is awkward and makes it easy to build yourself into a bad situation. The worst part is the loan interest. It sits at a terrifying 30%, which means taking out additional money is very risky. At least the ride selection is pretty good.
• Despite being in the Beginner Parks tab, Rock 'n' Roll - Flower Power/Woodstock from Time Twister has a rather difficult objective of getting 1,500 guests in only two years. If you aren't basically constantly building or advertising, then this park will definitely be a big struggle for you. It almost feels like this park is in the wrong category, as many of the Expert Parks in this expansion pack are considerably easier in comparison.
• Jurassic Safari in the Time Twister expansion pack. 2700 guests in 4 years doesn't sound hard, until you realize that you have two completely separate sections of park with guests that enter on both sides. The transport rides to get across are generally useless, which means you have to build a path across the valley, which will eat up a lot of time and money that you need to bring in guests. At least the ride selection is good.

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3

• Box Office. It is quite difficult for a scenario assumed to be a beginner one (since it's unlocked from the get-go). The park you start off with is filled with litter and vomit. The VIP for this scenario is very fussy. One speck of litter and she's out the door and you fail. The tycoon objectives take the cake though. The VIP wants to ride a roller coaster with an excitement level of 7 but she won't go on anything with an intensity level above 4 or 5. Most of the prebuilt coasters are too intense for her, so you are left to build your own coaster, which is a pain with the monorail and movie scenery lying around. Oh yeah, the other tycoon objective is to maintain a park rating of 700 for three months. In this disaster of a park, your rating tends to ebb and flow unpredictably and maintaining a good rating is easier said than done.
  • Consider something like this in the original RCT wasn't seen until Ivory Towers, one of the penultimate scenarios.
• La La Land involves having to impress the VIPs by building fireworks displays and then to get the Gold level two separate themed zones (Adventure and Sci-Fi) to "impress" them. Although the scenario dumps lots of money into the park account this is a quite difficult and monotonous trial and error task if done the conventional way, i.e.; creating large zones of open space, researching themed rides and scenery. Even after building what looks to be an acceptable themed area the VIPs are stupidly difficult to impress. Needless to say a quick web search shows up threads of screenshots showing how to build a themed area that will work: Simply drop down one of the themed rides on its own, isolated from the rest of the park and surround it with a themed path and a thick forest of themed trees. Then drop the VIP into the isolated area and let them ride the themed ride over and over in a loop and they will be 100% impressed. When they are impressed, pick them up and put them back in the rest of the park.

Fanmade Levels

• VJ's Scenario Pack (compatible with the second game, OpenRCT2 and Classic) has a couple of scenarios that can be pretty tricky for several reasons. Thankfully all of them that involve funds give you a lot more money to start off with compared to the other parks, but even then there's a select amount of parks that will be challenging.
  • Lust Forest of the "Beginner Parks" section has a relatively simple objective in building big roller coasters in a pretty big forest park ... but the issue comes from the horrible ride selection you get early on. You're going to be here for a long while trying to achieve that objective. Thankfully in Classic and OpenRCT2 there's a fast-forward feature, but such a feature doesn't exist in the base version of the second game.
  • Muddy Marine of the Challenging Parks section brings the worst of parks such as Whispering Cliffs and Pleasure Island in mind when it comes to limited land space. You don't have to worry about roller coasters, but you have an extremely limited space to work with. And you can't buy any land.
  • Vapor River itself isn't too bad... but you have an abnormally high loan of $75,000 that you have to pay off. The loan interest is only 5%, but that stuff adds up quick.
  • Amber's World has a worse loan of $255,000. That's far worse than Sprightly Park mentioned in the Corkscrew Follies expansion pack. Hope you can make a bunch of money-making coasters, because you will be here for a while.
  • Burner Badlands has Rainbow Valley's "unable to alter trees and land" restriction - and these trees are everywhere. Have fun trying to construct around the landscapes while constantly trying to keep the guests happy, as this one can be a huge pain.
  • Dawdling Desert requires you to get a park value of $700,000 within two years. Thankfully the game gives you a lot more money than usual and the ride selection is good, but this one's going to put your knowledge of ride construction to the test. Stu (a Lets Player who played through the official scenarios on Classic and then played through a bunch of fanmade levels including these) played this park and decided just to go the Park Value Bomb way, feeling like playing it the normal way would be borderline impossible.
  • Maximo Park has some of the worst disadvantages going for you. You have an absolutely godawful ride selection to work with and you cannot modify the land whatsoever. This means you'll have to build your whole entire park underground. Have fun trying to manage paths and staff while doing so, and contrary to popular belief, guests still vomit underground. Building your park underground will be costly as well.
  • Millenia Park isn't too bad on paper, but you'll need to be really careful on how to manage your money. If you're caught up building a very expensive roller coaster and need some extra funds, the extremely low loan won't be able to save you.
• Quantum's Edge (link here) has gotten an infamous name in the community due to its sheer difficulty. You start off with very limited narrow land (that outer surrounding ring you see in the link is all the land you have to work with), the land you can buy is very expensive, you can only buy so much land, you can't alter the terrain, and you can't even buy construction rights to bridge the gap to an island. Keep in mind the objective is "Get 3500 Guests without the Park Rating Dropping Below 700" as well ... in a park with guests that are difficult to please (maintaining that park rating will be difficult) and attract (so this will be a Marathon Level. And keep in mind your funds will generally be low and the land is also cramped, so it's hard to build large roller coasters that would even attract them if you're familiar with how to exploit the mechanic). Additionally, ride availability is awful (you don't really have that much variety to choose from) and you're not allowed to advertise to get those guests coming in. Good luck... you're going to need it.