If you're not familiar with Dark Souls or the "Souls" franchise, all you really need to know is that in the maybe 5 hours of playing it so far I have gotten through what is likely a total of 15 minutes of content. If you are at all familiar with it, you've probably heard somewhere that Dark Souls is "the hardest game ever" or "the most unforgiving fantasy experience of the 21st century" or even "God fucking dammit this game is broken as shit". Well, these are all accurate, and I've heard these all many times, and so I went into the game about 4 years later than everyone else with a certain expectation.
Dark Souls is definitely a difficult game, but it's very hard to describe why. If you're like me and you grew up on a mostly western buffet of games, even the hardest ones among them were pretty forgiving. I've played many fantasy RPG/adventure games, from Zelda to Elder Scrolls to Darksiders to Dragon Age to many more, but Dark Souls stands apart for multiple reasons.
Dark Souls introduces you to a fairly familiar world of fantasy with dragons, undead, wizards, knights, what have you, but then dashes your expectations and forces you to forget everything you thought you already knew about dungeon roamers. This is the challenge, because it's not the combat. (Although that can be excruciating at times.) Your brain undergoes radical reprogramming when you play the game, to the point where it feels like Dark Souls is your first time ever holding a joystick. In fact, if Dark Souls was the first videogame you ever played, you would fundamentally be on the same skill level as someone like me, who has been playing games their whole life.
This is why Dark Souls's "hardest game ever" reputation was misleading, at least to me. However, people weren't lying about the whole dying thing. Once you learn the combat mechanics, which admittedly are painstakingly tedious, you can progress with (relative) ease. It's just that you have to get very comfortable with dying, and you need to use each death as a learning experience of what not to do next.
I don't mean like in 3D Zelda games where you might die and go "oh, I guess I shouldn't go in there." I mean like you're going to die on the same boss 15+ times, and while making the 20 minute trek back to the boss, while fighting all the same monsters that respawned, you need to really contemplate where and how you fucked up, and if you don't, you'll die again with nothing to show from the experience.
Another way that dying in Dark Souls isn't like dying in other adventure games is that surprisingly enough, you're really not penalized for it. In other games, although you might die less times overall, you'll probably have to go to a previous save file. That's not the case here though. When you die, you have to go back to where you were and recollect all the souls you dropped, but you keep all other items you found and whatever "happened" during your life still "happened." (Except most enemies respawn, but the real pain in the ass ones like bosses and mini-bosses don't.)
I'm going to keep trudging through Dark Souls, I hope that if you were considering playing the game, or you already have played it, you understand where I'm coming from and what I mean by the challenge of the game not necessarily existing mechanically but almost psychologically. Happy gaming, and praise the sun!
-SK
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