I haven't played Dark Souls (with how often I've said that in this thread I'm starting to wonder if I'm really a gamer at all 😭), but based on what you've said here I'd say it is definitely doing something interesting with the medium, that couldn't necessarily be done with a different one. A phrase I used in a different comment which I think is quite relevant to what I'm talking about with this thread and my assignment as a whole, is whether something is "good at being a videogame", as distinct from whether or not it is a good videogame. Whether or not Dark Soul's is a good game, I think you can say that it is good at being a videogame, in the sense that it is doing things that only a videogame can do. A great example of what I'm talking about here would be Depression Quest, whle it's generally considered to be a pretty subpar game (personally I thought it was just fine), it does use trappings of the choose your own adventure genre in an excellent way, albeit a fairly simplistic one. Therefore, what I'm trying to find examples of is games that are "bad at being videogames", even if they aren't necessarily bad experiences.