It's a good game but it took me several hours before I started to get used to it. It is a very hard game, very, very hard. Extremely unforgiving but satisfying once you start to get a grip on it. You can't play it like a normal RPG though, it isn't. Dying is an integral part of it, you have to accept that you will die, a lot, but that each time you do you learn a little bit more about to beat it. Took me a bout 10 hours I think before I managed to complete the first boss but was then able to farm the whole level in about 20 minutes. Very time consuming, slow and steady. Have to work out how to kill as much as possible before they even see you and if they do timing is the key to melee, no hack and slash. The only things I really disliked about the game was the lack of mana regeneration (if you want to use magic, which is awesome, you have to spend a lot on spices), and the huge increases in levelling costs later on.
Oh and you really, really need to find the thiefs ring.
However I'll admit that I did give up without completing it even once (and diablo style you can keep playing it on harder and harder settings), as much as I enjoyed it, it was just too hardcore for me to keep sinking time into.
PS: just read that Goodbye Demon's souls article, never got that far but I can understand it!