My opinion is that despite scary monsters and an oppressive atmosphere the "Souls" formula games are not really survival horror games. They basically remind me of old school arcade "quarter munchers" with a dark atmosphere, and of course a one time fee for entry as opposed to actually making you pay a quarter (or 50 cents, or a dollar) to continue.
The thing that made games like "Silent Hill" and "Resident Evil" work is that while the protagonist could be rather tough, the game encouraged evasion as much, or more, than fighting, since like a relentless hoard the monsters will wear you down as there are more of them than there are resources (and perhaps even infinite monsters). Thus you have the whole "survival" aspect of whether you want to use your weapons for a specific situation or find another way around it, and of course you always know you need to make sure you have enough stuff saved up for the inevitable boss fights. Oddly the thing about RE and SH is that it became a sort of badge of honor early on to talk about how much stuff you had left when you got to the end.
In a lot of atmospheric action games despite how it might seem you effectively have massive, or even limitless, resources, and while it might be difficult, it's all about killing everything.
The "Souls" series is sort of like "Dead Space" when you get down to it, albeit harder. It comes down to surviving fairly linear environments full of enemies, and overcoming nasty battle set pieces with the tools you can assemble. I think Critical Miss sort of pointed out the problem with this kind of "horror" game when it made fun of "Dead Space" by showing Issac respawn right before a nasty fight, walking past one of the hallucinogenic monsters a bunch of time, he starts out find it scary, and towards the end as he keeps walking past it to try the fight again it's giving him advice on how to proceed like they are old buddies. In "Souls" and similar games it doesn't matter how freaky something is, odds are you'll spend so many times tromping past it, that it will get boring. I mean look at the original Demon's Souls (I think it was) you had a prison level where you had these mind-flayer type things with tentecles coming out of their hoods and lamps, they could be very dangerous and were intimidating looking, until you've pretty much sat there twiddling your thumbs for the 47,000th time watching their patrol pattern so you can remove them to proceed. In some respects I don't think a horror game can have a truly punishing level of difficulty since repetition is going to play itself out. It's like this you can walk into a maternity ward and wind up facing a vaguely humanoid mass of stillborn babies sewed together trying to kill you, you show up and will sit there and go "wow, that is just so wrong and F*cked up" but after you've seen it 40 times due to dying even that is going to stop being freaky and become more annoying than anything. Frustration can ruin pacing that horror relies on, and really that is why I think the "Souls" series can never really be horror, especially when part of the point is to frustrate you so you keep making mistakes. Bloodborne looks like a good game, and a good spiritual addition to that stable of games, but as freaky as it looks I imagine it more continues the trend of "grimdark atmosphere for a really hard customizable action game". I honestly can't really consider them RPGs either because I've always felt maintain their difficulty by forcing you down very specific paths, while there are multiple ways to play doing things like say limiting the use of magic (which Bloodborne doesn't even have) prevents you from playing as a dedicated mage, at the end of the day you do need to go in there and play the whole melee game at least part of the time, and while there are multiple builds, it seems at the end of the day it all comes down to the same basic types of things, which is part of why it's a big deal that in Bloodborn there apparently aren't shields like there were in Souls since at the end of the day hiding behind a massive shield was how a lot of people played the game because it was designed to work that way.
