The game lets you start with a single Estus flask. That's off-putting, no doubt about it, but it also provides with life gems every now and then (a nice touch from Demon's). Life is cut in half, gradually, but a restoration ring is found very early in the game. Add some AI problems, early powerful weapons and a quite lower difficulty and you have the whole "difficulty picture".
What's really making the game hard is the enemy vanishing after a ten or so kills. That means there is a finite amount of souls to collect from each area. Which in turn means that if you die often (and lose souls) you will not regain them easily. Grinding and farming is very limited. In the long run that will prove really sore for the gamer.
This, I stole from grandpa...It's called soap.
