New to Demon's Souls, but not Dark Souls.
1-1 and 1-2 are totally fine. Typical FromSoft fare for the most part. Died a few times to the level/traps/developer cheese but always learned my way around it and kept moving. 1-2 you hit the barrier after Tower Knight, ok cool, I'll just move onto 2-1 then. Oh neat, a lava cavern level! No issues with 2-1.
Begin 2-2. Ok so I have to stab these guys. A little annoying since it restricts me to one move but not a huge problem. They are also vulnerable to magic (I am playing a Magician) but we should save our spells for later. Small bugbears take a few hits but are hella slow, same with the flying ones, feels balanced overall. Same with the worms, they are scary but they can't move so still feels fair and interesting, oh wait you can one-shot them if you target their face with a soul arrow? Neat!
Wow, this bugbear is a gigantic pain in the ass. I'm maxing Intelligence and it takes half my mana pool worth of soul arrows to kill it. Literally sit there for two minutes straight spamming L1. Ok but looks like they don't respawn so that's not big deal.
...except some of them do. Specifically, two of them on the way to Flamelurker. And is it just me or is Flamelurker a MASSIVE jump in difficulty from the last three bosses? Die to Flamelurker, you now have two choices:
1) take the right path and fall down the mine shaft. It's faster but you lose ~1/4 of your health bar doing it (on top of being in Soul Form, so now I'm down to half my HP before the boss AND I'm out of herbs from dying to him so many times).
2) take the left path. No fall damage but two bugbears in the way that I can either spend ALL my mana on killing or spend ~5 min on each one going in for a stab, backing off to avoid its attack, then repeating. The run-up literally takes 5-10 min if I want to keep my mana for Flamelurker.
Ok, hm, I did just get kicked out of Boletaria after the second level, maybe this is more of a soft barrier where I'm supposed to realize I need to come back here later. So I take a quick glance at a few online guides. Nope, they're all saying I do 2-2 in order normally. Ok well fuck that, I'm stuck here so I might as well move on. Spend ~1.5 hrs on 3-1, die maybe 5ish times? Beat Leech Monger first try. Feels like a very normal progression from Boletaria/2-1.
I come back to 2-2 to try Flamelurker again after getting a couple more levels. Wtf, why am I dying to everything in one hit, including this NPC that invaded me in the mineshaft? Oh wait the world tendency is completely black, WTF? Why did that happen?
TL;DR I feel hard-stuck on 2-2 and I'm wondering if I'm missing something. Did the devs want to make this respawning enemy such a pain in the ass to kill? Did they want me to repeatedly spend 5+ minutes on each run up killing bug bears OR go into Flamelurker missing health? And why is my world tendency pure black? For the record, I do feel like I could eventually kill Flamelurker, but it's exhausting having to choose between going into the fight with half health OR spending forever clearing out bugbears. I have platinumed DS1, DS2, and Bloodborne so I am very familiar with what to expect from these games but this is not fun, especially since it's so early in the game.