Since I finish The Ascent last week, I took to “achievement hunting” to mop up some of the low hanging fruit achievements that I missed out in the game, bringing my total number of achievements for The Ascent at 57 out of a possible 66, which is not too bad.

Achievements have been a fundamental aspect of video games beginning with the humble high-score charts in individual games. It was not until 2005 when Microsoft introduced Gamerscore with the Xbox 360 which provide multi-game achievement tracking that was easily accessible. The phrase “Achievement Unlocked” is both a meme and an indicator back then when gamers unlocked an achievement.

This concept caught on like wildfire on other platforms but with varying degrees of success. Folks such as Steam introducing their (blandly-titled) Achievements for games on the PC, Mac and Linux, while Sony brought in Trophies starting for games on the Sony PlayStation 3. These, along with the Xbox Gamerscore are great examples of achievements done right, and I’ve always enjoyed earning achievements on these platforms.

Apple introduced Game Center for their iOS, but I’m not bothered with checking on my achievements on that, maybe due to the fact that there are not many compelling games on the iPhone. Nintendo has been a famous outlier of the three console makers whereby there’s no multi-game achievement tracking on the platform despite the Switch being its most connected console ever.

The same goes with Activision Blizzard on the PC front despite having popular franchises such as StarCraft and Diablo within their catalogue. Hopefully this would change once they’ve been completed brought into the fold by Microsoft.

I’m not a video game achievement completist, but it’s quite nice to through achievement stats. Based on my Steam statistics, the following games have double-digits in terms of achievements earned:

  • The Ascent (45 hours on record) (57/66 achievements earned)
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown (166 hours on record) (59/85 achievements earned)
  • Fallout 4 (206 hours on record) (56/84 achievements earned)
  • Torchlight 2 (60 hours on record) (75/119 achievements earned)
  • XCOM 2 (41 hours on record) (38/88 achievements earned)
  • Civilization V (102 hours on record) (51/286 achievements earned)

According to Steam, one of the rarest achievements that I’ve got is “Enemy Blade No More” from Civilization V, whereby playing as Indonesia, I had to capture an enemy capital with a Kris Swordsman with the Enemy Blade promotion in order to net this achievement. Apparently only 0.70% of players have earned this. What’s the rarest achievement you’ve gotten in a video game? Chime in!