ShittyDarkSouls

It has the finest atmosphere and world-building of almost any game. It does however have a whole slew of issues that are fixed in DS2, improved in DS3, and perfected more-or-less in Elden Ring.

• levelling up: there's a nearly-worthless stat, the endgame is either very easy or very hard depending on your character build and you won't know what you're doing the first time you play, and you can't respec. The other games have respec items and a better choice of weapons for any given stat spread.

• getting lost: you can go the "wrong way" from the start of the game, and leave yourself very badly screwed over. (In fact, the "right way" is kind of the least obvious.) The other games let you warp between rest points from the very start, which spoils the atmosphere a bit, but respects your time a lot better.

• useless weapons: some of the weapons are a trap - they have really bad scaling or some other misfeature that means it would be a mistake to build your character around them. One of DS2's best features is that nearly every weapon is viable for the right build.

• weapon upgrades: the weapon upgrade path is the fever dream of a madman; I've completed Dark Souls several times and I'd still need to look at a graph of how you actually do it. You need specific blacksmiths for some upgrade paths, and a couple of them are a real bastard to get to. The "back of an envelope" system is present in all other games, and they've a warpable bonfire near their blacksmith(s).

Dark Souls has a bit of a paradoxical position as one of the best games ever to play for the second time - bit like Morrowind in that it'll happily let you screw yourself over, but that makes it great to replay. I might be tempted to look up a "my first hour in Dark Souls" video or something like that to get you off on the right foot; doesn't need to be full of spoilers, just not set yourself up for a headache.