Achievement hunting on Steam is serious business. While Valve's storefront might not have Xbox's Gamerscore or PlayStation's Trophies, there are still plenty of PC gamers who appreciate the way Steam achievements challenge them to play games in new and interesting ways. Then there's the satisfaction of knowing you're one of just a small percentage of players who've explored every nook and cranny, maxed out every stat, or earned every gold medal a game has to offer. 

The thing is, a lot of Steam achievements are kind of boring. Kill 10,000 enemies, hit level 99 in every class, finish the game on Ultra Nightmare Hardcore difficulty—most of the objectives feel like they've fallen straight out of a free-to-play MMO's quest log. Even the rarest achievements are often little more than tedious grind fests, requiring you to play 500 online matches in a multiplayer game with no active player base, or fight alongside a game's developer when that developer has long ago moved onto their next project. 

These achievements aren't particularly fun to earn, let alone read about. But buried in Steam's massive catalog of games are some truly obscure, brutally difficult achievements that less than 0.1 percent of players have managed to accomplish. These are achievements worthy of the name. Most of us will never earn them, but we can dream.

Note: Total owners approximated from SteamSpy. Verified achievement stats through AStats.

Devil Daggers

Devil Dagger - Survive 500 secondsTotal Owners: 236,000 Completion Percentage: 0.1

For something you could complete in the downtime between Dota matches, frantic FPS Devil Dagger's one and only achievement has managed to defy 99.9 percent of players for well over a year now. That might seem odd given how simple its requirement sounds: all you have to do is survive for 500 seconds. I mean, I do that all the time. See. That last 500 seconds? I just survived that. 

But yeah. Surviving Devil Daggers is a wee bit tougher than running out the clock in real life. Despite the game selling for a mere fiver, just 0.1 percent of players have managed to avoid croaking for the 8 minutes and 20 seconds necessary to snag the 'Devil Dagger' achievement. Watching replays of those runs is equal parts mesmerizing and depressing, making it painfully clear just how amateur my own skills are. I could probably spend the next year playing nothing but Devil Daggers and still not come close to the graceful death-dealing of players like the world-record-smashing bowsr. When the apocalypse hits and the whole world goes to hell, I'll be the redshirt incinerated in the first ten seconds.

Crusader Kings 2

Not so Bad - Survive the End Times Total Owners: 1.4 million Completion Percentage: 0.1

Crusader Kings 2, champion of the grand strategy genre, is full of intricate, multi-layered achievements few players have managed to unlock. From installing a female ruler in the five baronies of the Orthodox Pentarchy, to trampling the Pope with a horde of elephants, over a dozen eclectic achievements are currently sitting at a completion rate of less than 0.1 percent.  

The one I want to shout out, though, is the 'Not so Bad' achievement awarded for surviving the End Times. Ostensibly, you unlock this achievement by surviving the rise of the Prophet of Doom and the Black Death he's convinced will destroy humanity. A Crusader Kings player going by the username Xolotl123 on Reddit, however, inadvertently earned themselves the achievement due to their investment in high-quality hospital care and their imprisonment of the Prophet for disturbing the peace. The Prophet then hanged himself, but not before sending the player a letter that read: 'If you are reading this letter, I am with God, or with Lucifer..., if so, then you were right. If not, then I was right.' 

I've not had the time to play Crusader Kings 2, but after reading this story, I think I'm going to have to clear my schedule. Any game where you can avert the End Times through hygiene is a winner in my book. 

Rising Storm / Red Orchestra 2

Bringing a sword to a sword fight – As an American soldier kill an Axis soldier wielding a Katana, with a Katana. Stick it to Tojo – As an Allied soldier, kill 100 Axis soldiers with a bayonet. Total Owners: 2.7 million (unreliable due to free weekend) Completion percentage: 0.1 - 0.2

Rising Storm's focus on historically authentic, asymmetrical WWII combat means that, naturally, American soldiers do not spawn into the battlefield with katanas. In order to get one, you have to defeat a Japanese soldier who's carrying one. And in order to get the "Bringing a sword..." achievement, you then have to pick up their katana, find another Japanese soldier with a katana, and then defeat them with the weapon of their ancestors. It's a hard scenario to concoct in an FPS where rifles and grenades are the preferred way to fight.

Bit.Trip Beat

MEAT.BOY SMELLS - Get a perfect in 1-1 using only a game pad.Total Owners: 311,00Achievement percentage: 1.6

Heresy! An achievement that requires ditching the holy mouse and keyboard for a filthy gamepad? What does BIT.TRIP BEAT take us for, console players? Everyone knows a good M+K combo is the only way to play. Sure, it makes driving games a bit twitchy, and performing combos in third-person action games can be tricky without analogue sticks, and fighting games don't always work so great, and stealth sequences tend to be a little wonky with WASD…

Okay. So maybe gamepads aren't that bad. Still, locking an achievement to a specific piece of hardware is a surefire way to tick off achievement hunters. The BIT.TRIP devs found that out the hard way with the game's 'SIXTH.SENSE' achievement, which required players to beat a level using Razer's short-lived Sixense motion controller. The backlash to 'SIXTH.SENSE' drove the devs to delete the achievement from Steam completely, which technically makes it one of the rarest achievements out there. Not quite as rare as a game with motion controls that don't feel like total garbage, but still…

The Stanley Parable

Go outside - Don't play The Stanley Parable for five years Total Owners: 2.1 million Number of achievers: 2 verified through AStats (6.9 percent on Steam) 

Games are meant to be played—we usually take that much for granted. It's a little odd, then, when a game actively encourages you not to play it. Odd, however, is what The Stanley Parable's all about. I mean, one of the game's endings involves running back and forth between two buttons for four hours. And that's not to mention the pointed commentary on the nature of free will and the human tendency towards obeisance. Like I said, odd. 

The Stanley Parable's weirdest elements, however, are definitely its achievements. In addition to an achievement simply entitled 'Unachievable' (paradoxically earned by 3.9 percent of players), there's the 'Go outside' achievement that tasks players with not playing the game for five years straight. Since The Stanley Parable released in October 2013, no one can legitimately earn this achievement until October next year. Of course, that hasn't stopped some unscrupulous Steam users from setting their computer clocks forward to unlock the achievement early.  

Cheating to not play a game? I guess some people will do anything for their sweet cheevos. 

Garry's Mod

Addict - You have wasted a year of your life playing GMod! Total Owners: 13.2 million Number of achievers: 9 verified on AStats (1.8 percent on Steam) 

You can do a lot of things in the 8760 hours that make up a single year. You could play 105,120 matches of Rocket League. You could marathon the entire current run of The Simpsons—all 617 episodes—38 times over. You could hitch a ride on a rocket and fly to Mars, with enough time left over to plant the seeds of an interplanetary rebellion. 

You could also spend every one of those 8760 hours playing Garry's Mod in order to unlock the 'Addict' achievement. And when I say playing, I don't just mean booting up the game and letting it idle in the menu. You have to be connected to an active server for your time to count. Unsurprisingly, the hefty investment involved has kept the achievement's completion percentage at just 1.8 percent, even with achievement hunters over at AStats devising strategies for minimizing the resources used by Garry's Mod so you can leave it running in the background while you tend to other tasks. 

I have to wonder, though, how many people left their computers on while they were working or sleeping solely to unlock this achievement? At a modest estimate, 8760 hours' worth of electricity would cost roughly $210 USD, which is a whole lot of money for a single achievement. Kind of puts all those pesky microtransactions to shame, doesn't it? 

Train Simulator

DLC scenarios Total Owners: 995,000 Completion percentage: 0

Speaking of money, Train Simulator boasts some of the rarest achievements on Steam, but that's not because they're brutally difficult or stubbornly obscure. Heck, the achievement descriptions make it pretty obvious what you've got to do: the 'It Works For Dogs!' achievement reads 'Awarded for completing scenario [RailfanMode] Barking. It's not like the game's unpopular either, with nearly a million owners on Steam and a median playtime of a respectable 7.5 hours. 

No, what makes Train Simulator's achievements so rare is that fiendish friend of ours: DLC. Train Simulator is notorious for having the most expensive DLC on Steam, with its total value currently sitting at $6254.43 USD. Worse, Train Simulator ties many of its achievements to its DLC, leading to a wealth of 0 percent and 0.1 percent completion rates across the board.  

But that $6254.43? I'd want a real honest-to-god train if I was forking over that much cash. If it was anything like Train Simulator, though, it'd probably lock out the train whistle as premium DLC. Steam whistle: only $0.99 per toot! 

Ark: Survival Evolved

Artifact Archaeologist – You personally retrieved all Eight Artifacts! Total Owners: 4.7 million Completion Percentage: 0.2

A whole lot of people play ARK: Survival Evolved, and yet even the most common of its seven achievements has been earned by less than 5 percent of players. But while 95 percent of ARK players haven't defeated the game's first Ultimate Life Form, 99.8 percent remain vexed by its toughest achievement: 'Artifact Archaeologist', rewarded for retrieving every Artifact in the game. It sounds simple enough, but this is where ARK's nature as an Early Access game comes back to bite it on the rump.  

According to the achievement description, there are only eight artifacts in ARK: Survival Evolved. This isn't true. There are 14 artifacts in total, 10 of which can be obtained through normal play, 3 which are locked to the Scorched Earth DLC, and one which can only be spawned through a console command. For a game that has already seen its fair share of controversy, ARK has left quite a few achievement hunters pretty disappointed. Still, at least they can take solace in the giant bees that have just been added to the game. That's something, right?  

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Dragonrider - Tame and ride 5 dragons Total Owners: 11 million (unreliable due to free weekend) Completion percentage: 0.8

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you've played Skyrim, or at least heard enough about it to understand the game's premise. You're the dragonborn, you need to save the world from an evil dragon, yada yada yada. In short, the game basically revolves around dragons. 

How, then, is the achievement for riding dragons so rare? Only 0.8 percent of the millions of Skyrim players have tamed five or more of the mythical creatures and taken to the skies, which makes exactly zero sense to me. Who wouldn't want a dragon as their personal chauffeur? It's not like you'd have to worry about anyone jacking your scaly pal; any thief foolish enough to try would be charred to a crisp before they could shout Fus Ro Dah. I guess Skyrim players are just too busy getting busy and fighting Macho Man Randy Savage to spend their time becoming certified dragon pilots. 

Black Mesa

Rare Specimen – Send the Hidden Hat to Xen. Total Owners: 500,000 Completion percentage: 2.1 percent 

Hats are all the rage these days. I have it on good authority from my stock broker that the hat economy is only going to go up—and that's coming from a man who wears a top hat, so you know it's legit. My wardrobe is already full of baseball caps, bowler hats, fezes, and beanies, just waiting for the day when my fabric fortune will be ready to claim. The only thing I don't quite understand is why my broker keeps mentioning Dota. Eh, never mind. I'm sure it's nothing. 

Video games, it turns out, are just as keen to cash in on the hat craze. Black Mesa, the fan-made recreation of the original Half-Life, adds in the 'Rare Specimen' achievement that tasks good old Gordon Freeman with locating a hidden purple top hat and lugging it all the way from the Black Mesa Research Facility on Earth to the alien dimension of Xen. It might not sound that tricky, but apparently Gordon's more interested in trivial things like saving the world instead of securing his future in the hat economy--only 2.1 percent of players have carried the top hat all the way to its new interdimensional marketplace. 

Wait, that gives me an idea. What if I started selling digital hats instead of physical ones? Ooh, I think I'm onto something here. I better stop typing before someone beats me to the punch… 

Summer 2017 is when Crowbar Collective hopes to launch the Xen portion of its Black Mesa Half-Life remake—an area which won't feature in the original mod variation. In October, the developer said this decision was made due to its desire to "to do Xen the justice it deserves, and have it be the definitive climax to the Half-Life 1 story." Crowbar has now teased a Xen-flavoured image alongside a new update post.

"The team remains, as always, hard at work on Xen! Currently our specific focus is on gameplay: crafting a fun and cohesive experience from start to finish," reads the post. "We want our version of Xen to feel like it really belongs with the rest of the game in terms of mechanics, cohesion and progression. But we also want to push the boundaries and explore this unique and varied setting; to build an experience that feels both fresh and familiar to players from all walks of Half-Life veterancy."

The post continues: "While our Xen is certainly going to be gorgeous, we are first and foremost really committed to making sure that the gameplay works on every level. To give a bit of an exciting tease into what we’re doing at the moment, and as our own little holiday gift to you lot, please enjoy our first ever publicly released screenshot of Xen."

Crowbar goes on to say more Xen-related media will be teased in the "coming months", as well as detailed progress updates ahead of summertime next year.  

For more on Crowbar Collective's Black Mesa, check out Chris' Early Access review.  

Off the back of its Halloween update and coinciding sale, Crowbar Collective has announced a rough timeline for the Xen portion of its Black Mesa Half-Life remake. Still living in Early Access, Black Mesa's take on the otherworldly locale that rounded off Gordon Freeman's first outing will portray what Crowbar reckons Valve would have done "without the limitations of the time."

That means its maps have been redesigned and expanded both in size and in number. "We wanted to use the holiday and the sale to announce our rough timeline for Xen. We are currently targeting a summer 2017 release," says Crowbar via an update post. "We will keep you up to date on our progress and we plan to show off some media as we finish developing Xen to give everyone a glimpse at what we are working on."

In mid-2015, Crowbar confirmed the original mod iteration of Black Mesa would not receive Xen levels, however the process of getting them onto Steam and into the Early Access game has taken longer than planned. The team now has summer 2017 in its sights, though, and wants "to do Xen the justice it deserves, and have it be the definitive climax to the Half-Life 1 story."

The update includes the following similarly-scaled shots which show the original game against Black Mesa's reinterpretation:

For more on Crowbar Collective's Black Mesa, check out Chris' Early Access review.

Alpha and Early Access reviews offer our preliminary verdicts on in-development games. We may follow up this unscored review with a final, scored review in the future. Read our full review policy for details.

As an accomplishment, it's hard to think of a parallel to Black Mesa: dozens of modders painstakingly and voluntarily spending years of time and effort to recreate Valve's groundbreaking first-person sci-fi shooter Half-Life in the Source engine. After a free release in 2012, Black Mesa has now made its way to Steam, ripe for the buying. Though the game ends with Gordon's leap into Xen (we won't see the bouncy dimension itself until Black Mesa is complete), it's still a long, exciting, action-packed game and a major achievement for the modders responsible.

Obviously, the visuals are a great leap forward from 1997's Half-Life, which over the years has slowly turned from charmingly ugly to mostly just ugly, except for the most nostalgic of gamers. At the same time, the Source Engine itself is getting pretty darn creaky these days, so Black Mesa doesn't look particularly great alongside current releases, especially the models and animations. Other limits of the Source Engine come quickly into focus as well, mostly in the frequent loading points between maps. The famous tram ride that begins the game in is broken into three parts due to pauses for loading, and in some of the faster paced portions of the game, loading screens crop up so quickly it becomes a little irritating. Source's physics, meanwhile, aren't really exploited for much besides a few new puzzles involving carrying a plug to a socket or reattaching a valve wheel.

The main issues with Black Mesa are the issues that come along with Half-Life itself: the over-reliance on platforming puzzles, vent crawling, ladder climbing, and laser beam hopping. Too much time hunting through a massive complex looking for that one door that will actually open or that one switch that can actually be flipped. Too many similar fights against the same small handful of enemy types. Too many long, slow trips down to some water-filled, body-strewn section of the complex to push a button that starts a generator or pump or giant fan, followed by the long slog back through enemies who suddenly teleport into your path. Too many goddamn barnacle monsters that will never, ever actually kill you but simply force you to sigh and fire a shotgun blast at the ceiling when they snare you.

Never fear, though. In addition to the chaff, Black Mesa rejuvenates the best parts of Half-Life. The wonderful real-time scripted sequences, in which hapless scientists and guards are dragged off into vents, yanked through ceiling tiles, exploded, shredded, burned, and chomped, which still prove entertaining and serve as warnings as to what dangers lie ahead. Those moments when you fight your way to the surface, only to find it crawling with soldiers who are not there to rescue you but permanently silence you, and you're forced back into a new section of the sprawling subterranean complex. The wonderful chaos when soldiers and aliens encounter each other, and for once you're not the only target in the room. The way your name begins to carry heft and meaning as you progress, as awestruck lab techs and increasingly frustrated grunts learn of your exploits ahead of your arrival.

There are bugs in Black Mesa—it's Early Access, after all—mainly related to enemy A.I.: a few times monsters ran right past me or didn't respond at all, the friendly guards and scientists usually had difficulty following me, and there was one memorable moment when an Alien Grunt appeared to have an extended fist-fight with a door he was stuck in. There are some new lines of dialogue with a couple clever references for fans of Half-Life lore, and the music, though I didn't especially care for it, is competently composed.

The Steam version of the mod comes with multiplayer, too: deathmatch and team deathmatch on a number of arena-style maps, for some silly and rather mindless multiplayer chaos that feels quite reminiscent of the original Half-Life Deathmatch.

Verdict

With vastly improved yet still dated graphics, Black Mesa carries with it both the highs and lows of the original Half-Life. It's a remarkable accomplishment and provides hours of exciting, challenging, and occasionally tiresome gaming.

Crowbar Collective, the creators of Half-Life remake Black Mesa, spent a few hours last night letting the internet shout questions at them until they broke down into a series of carefully crafted answers. Aka, a Reddit AMA.

As part of it, the team confirmed that the Xen levels coming to Black Mesa's early access release will not be making it to the free mod version.

"It's impossible," wrote level designer Joe R. "In order to make Xen look the best it possibly can look, we need to upgrade the engine with new features. These new features will make it incompatible with the mod version."

Elsewhere, level designer Jordan F explains what exactly makes the versions incompatible. "Organic environments are not something the Source engine does particularly well," Jordan writes. "Making Xen look as good as we want it to requires lots of improvements to the way the engine handles rendering and lighting. We can't port these changes back to the mod because we don't have source code access to that engine version."

This isn't the end of mod support, however. According to Joe, the team are looking at porting bug fixes from the early access version to the mod version.

I'd call it a mysterious countdown, but everyone had pretty much guessed what the Black Mesa site was ticking down to. That site has now tuck its last tick, and lo and behold here's Black Mesa on Steam.

Specifically, it's on Steam Early Access. That's because, as when the Half-Life remake was first released back in 2012, the Xen chapter still isn't finished.

"We currently have the first ~85% of our single player campaign completed," explains the Early Access Q&A. "For the last 15% we want to not only recreate it, but improve upon it to make it an enjoyable and memorable experience."

The Early Access version includes new visuals, new voice over, updated encounters and stability changes, and also adds multiplayer. The final release will feature more maps and modes than are currently included, but the presence of a Steam Workshop page for Black Mesa should ensure some additional arenas to tide fans over.

Black Mesa is currently available on Steam for 15/$20, and that price is set to rise when the game leaves Early Access. Given the recent furore over paid-for mods, I'll be interested to see the reaction to this—especially given that the download link for the previous (and free) mod version has disappeared from Black Mesa's official site, if not from ModDB.

Update: The Black Mesa website has been updated with a download option for the original mod version.