You keep mentioning "the dark souls" as some kind of measurement. Have you ever played the souls series? Including demon souls, bloodborne and Nioh? Even though Nioh is not from the developers of the souls series this game is often compared to it as it has very similar aspects and the difficulty level is insane.
I am just wondering because I am personally a great fan of the souls series. The difficulty and the fact you just start without any information at all and the tuturial is just to show you what the buttons are for.
I am always looking for new challenging games and I wonder if you could help me in my search ;-)
I am a fan of the series myself, having finished everything from Demon's Souls to Bloodborne and also playing Nioh at the moment. In the article I criticised journalists who call other, unrelated games "the Dark Souls" of their genre. For example, Crash Bandicoot being called the Dark Souls of 3D platformers, or Project Cars 2 being the Dark Souls of racing games. I find this label lazy and unprofessional.
I agree, I got your point but I was just wondering if you yourself have been playing these games and if you also feel these games set a certain level of difficulty.
I personally enjoy Nioh and Bloodborne more as the pace is a lot higher and it is more focussed on dashing instead of blocking.
May I ask how far in Nioh you currently are?
Well, I reached the mines in Nioh.
The difficulty of the Souls series is not always fair. There are unavoidable attacks and also traps that you can not see coming, cheapening the experience as a whole. I started playing because of the robust combat system and remained for the interesting lore, so all's well that ends well.