I think Alex Culafi really did a disservice to trying to describe Dark Souls, but at the same time, I would say the games are hard to describe.
To me, at least, Playing Dark Souls is akin to... really, the first time you ever played the Legend of Zelda or perhaps Castlevania: Symphony of the Night? I'd say moreso The Legend of Zelda, yeah. the world is open, the games can easily be sequence broken, and the story is something that you only can fit the pieces of the puzzle together if you piece together what little scraps the game does give you and create your own headcannons. Alex speaks of it being a 60 hour Action RPG. this may be true for your first time, but I have started the game over a couple of times [1 NG+ playthrough and 1 with an alternate build to the one I tried the first time] and went 15 and 8 hours respectively, and I could probably go faster if not for grinding and faffing about in general trying things I hadn't on the first time. That's really where Alex fails to describe the idea that this is a game that can be played in MANY different and equally valid ways! you can practically rediscover the game by simply trying a different play style each time, and have so many tension filled moments!
I only started playing the first Dark Souls last April, and I -STILL- cannot put the game down. I was playing it while listening to this podcast [Playing NG+ on my DEX/INT build going through Duke's Archives. I also have a str build file I'm starting where I'm going to try and main the Demon's Great Axe or something and play most of the game with the fat roll and such. to see how playing the game tankier pans out for me when I'm so used to light/Woodgrain ring roll] before I paused the show to talk about this and my eventual segway into Bloodborne.
the combat is indeed weightier and more of a patient version of Ocarina of Time's Z targeting, where the recovery on attacks can leave you so open, and the enemies are VERY damaging. the amount of mechanics that work in this gameplay style's favor is more than I'm willing to list on this post to keep it from being a mile long, but the game is SO thoughtfully designed on a basic level, and makes the combat in particular something where you have to step back and assess the situation. it's actually has a lot of the same assessing enemy placement and stiffness to combat that the original castlevania games had, where perseverance in deconstructing an encounter was just as important to the game as your manual dexterity.
The biig difference between any of the Souls games and Bloodborne is the idea that in the souls games, a lot of your time is spent behind a shield. block or parry an oncoming attack and retort with your own blow. Miyazaki-san wants to put the onus on the player rather than the enemy to create the offensive opening one would need to finish off the punishing enemies, and this intrigues me far more than Dark Souls 2, even if I am certainly playing that game and Demon Souls at some point.