Simon Byron

It's extremely harsh but mostly fair.

I've been reading people chatting about it and it seems awfully complicated. Humanities, bonfires, summoning... Will an idiot like me understand it?

Mostly not hard, but you have to learn its language before that becomes clear.

And is that taught in-game I would I be expected to read up in advance?

I imagine you're not going to like it. You might enjoy it for a few hours, while it's not punishingly hard, but then a boss will just frustrate you until you give up. (This was my experience, anyway.)

have you played Hollow Knight? People keep telling me they’re really similar. And I got really frustrated with HK.

Tony, did you know that you have an acknowledgment in the Curve, and Simon doesn't. This seemed to upset him yesterday :-)

I completely messed up my character build first time I played it - spending in-game currency (souls) to level up the wrong attributes. You can not survive as a vanilla (average at everything) build - you need to specialise. Personally I found soul-arrows to be my way forward.

Also - levelling up armour and weapons is just as important as character stats. A beefy character with weak armour won’t last long.