I expect to be met by GIT GUD spam and perhaps calls about I didn't get the game, but I accept it. I played the first game (Dark Souls, not Demon's) plenty of hours after hearing about its legendary difficulty. The first boss was challenging but felt fair, so I went on. There was this initial area after the cutscene with the bonfire, the ruins ahead, the cemetery on the left, a path below and so on. I tried all paths I've found, and all seemed one-shot impossible enemies, except for the cemetery. This path was hard, skeletons would only take a couple hits to kill me while I needed to hit them many times, but I slowly managed to learn the ins and outs and, exploiting their AI and such to try and optimize my route. It was a cool challenge. I also liked going back and forward to use this to level up a bit.
Eventually, I started to get over this part, only to be met by a cave with lethal bats. I eventually parkoured my way out of that one, only to be met by what turned out to be an optional mage enemy of sorts that one shot kills me. Been on this path for hours but it goes nowhere apparently. Spoke to someone about this, told me that path is optional, and I should have gone for the hill on the right. I'm dumb, I didn't notice that path. Went over there, continued the game for a while, beat some enemies and bosses. Wasn't a huge fan of all these branching paths leading to locations that take a while to get through but then are no good, because they were not the optimal route. Shortcuts were interesting.
Eventually, I lost interest a bit. I was loving the worldbuilding, but the rolling around until I wait to attack was getting a bit repetitive. I was already getting tired of looter shooters with giant healthbars, so timing 10 mins of identical sword hits on an enemy was just not very exciting to me anymore. I also constantly kept the feeling that I'm missing something, that I'm not doing something, that I could have it easier by reading a guide. And indeed, I had folks tell me later "oh you could have cheesed this boss by shooting arrows at his tail" or "oh but you can go invulnerable in this exact spot" and such. That was a bit disappointing to hear, but that's on me I guess.
I probably stopped after 15something hours. I was getting a bit bored of the formula. Have not tried another Souls game since by From Software, tried some clones. Out of those, the only one I liked enough to finish was The Surge, but by the end I felt like I had enough of that too, so I never bothered with DLC2 (I had the first one around) or the sequel. It's a fascinating genre and style this game invented, but I can't say it's for me. It's not even about the challenge, it's about how tedious it can be to perform things with a slow combat system and stamina running out every second. Like, I "get it", and I've made decent progress in the game. But I don't see this as a formula that I want to revisit every other year.
Maybe I'll try again one day, who knows.
