Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy specifically calls this out. It's brutally difficult from the jump, and his narration talks about how videogames used to ask a lot of their user. They were unforgiving challenges with no guarantee of obvious success. My brain instantly flashed over to TMNT on the NES and just how hard that and Battletoads were.

If you haven't played Getting Over It, it's a tremendous meditation on failure, and Bennett's narrations as you struggle are brilliant from a philosophical standpoint. He talks about how the challenge and failure and difficult ARE the point for a certain class of gamer and how that's the game he wanted to build.

For another take, Super Hexagon provides that same "this is impossible but I'm getting closer to possible and that feels good."