Went in expecting an okay Soulslike, came out with a piece of myself missing, like I touched a chthonic artifact.

It's sort of like if you made a gibbon code a Souls game. They might be able to process adjectives like "difficult", "cryptic", or "chunky", but that's their full and complete view of the genre. Try and make them process anything more than that, and they'll start slapping each other around, or throwing their shit at people.