I like difficult gameplay. I've put a lot of hours in mastering some rather hardcore rhythm games, danmakus, some incredibly tough levels on precision-based games like TrackMania, I even used to be tournament-level at Unreal Tournament once upon a time. Difficulty, when done well, is amazing. My main gripe with Dark Souls is that a lot of the difficulty comes from trial and error, bad design, disappointing technical elements. If a sword misses you by 20cm but your hitbox is still somehow hit, that's bad design. If an enemy one shots you from a dark corner in a way you were not supposed to know about, that's bad design. If you're allowed to go hours in a certain direction only to realize you can do jackshit there and you were somehow supposed to know that was not the way to go, that's bad design.
The difficulty comes from the fact the resources are scarse: you die with 2-3 hits, you can land only like 2-3 shots before you get hit yourself or your stamina runs off, every wrong step is some mortal trap or fall into the abyss, and so on. The game expects you to die a billion times to things you can not know in advance, until you exercise enough to pull the dance off. This is absolutely unlike the hardest levels in, say, Super Mario, TrackMania, Touhou or something: there, what you need to do is fairly obvious, what you need to do is find the ideal path and actually perform it correctly. Dark Souls' difficulty does not come from this, it comes from overcoming enemies and level designs intentionally hampering the player until he/she can abuse it someway, like making the enemies fall off a cliff, hitting a boss from a mile away to damage it beforehand or making yourself absurdly powerful by grinding an area.
I tried the game for a fairly lengthy amount of time, but the accomplishment of finally getting through an area was largely diminished by the game's faults. Improving at the game did not feel fun because the game would continously spam you with (initially) unavoidable deaths, which forces players to replay sections they already mastered just because they have no idea what comes after that will probably one-shot them until they figure out how to counter it. To me, this is not good design nor it is fun. I insisted with the game because the lore was fascinating (hence I proposed this game as my pick for the thread), but I had to realize that the 90% of my playtime was not about having fun, it was about replaying tedious sessions where I had to perform the same basic attacks many times without fail to move on.
The Surge actually delivered this concept in a much more enjoyable way, for my tastes anyway, by introducing better shortcuts, less random traps or enemies in unseen locations, rules that are more clear, chances of getting better gear by taking risks but without a way to overlevel yourself, etc.. Ironically, The Surge's lore was nowhere near as intriguing as Dark Souls. If only the two things could be combined. Granted, after my so-so experience with Dark Souls 1 I did not play the sequels, so it's entirely possible the sequels fixed a lot of my issues with the first game (from what I saw in gameplay videos, that probably is not the case, but I don't want to judge those titles without having tried them).
