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Notes -
You can do this in a book, like Pale Fire - many postmodern authors have tried with varying degrees of success. What makes Dark Souls unique is the minimal information you get and the diegetic storytelling (Silksong take inspiration from the latter and really ramps it up).
I think the question of difficulty and slogging-through as an emotional experience is closer to the core of the question, but that's also in books and films - look at Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below or Bela Tarr's adaptation of his novel Satantango, or Twin Peaks: The Return for TV. IMO the slam-dunk in this list is branching paths, like morality choices changing the game.
A notable difference I see between Pale Fire and Dark Souls is that there's a real possibility for a reader to miss the content of the underlying story as a medium.
When reading a poem like Pale Fire the reader can experience the story differently depending on order they read the poem and the footnote-narrative. But because the medium of the book presents all the story in the same up front manner there's no opportunity (at a medium level) to hide a second story underneath such that someone exploring every nook and cranny is going to find a new character that they couldn't even perceive without some skill/knowledge/exploration checks in the interactive domain.
A novice reader can simply open up page 140 of Pale Fire and plainly observe the words of Kinbote's commentary, whereas a novice Dark Souls cannot observe Gwyndolin's story or even know it's there ahead of time.
I probably should, but cheeky answer is that I probably won't go the first-hand experience. While I enjoy the idea of it I probably won't walk the walk in this kind of thing.
I full agree on changing the game itself, the way of interaction, more than the branching morality paths.
Choose-your-own-advence books have branching paths based on choice to experience, but because of the medium can't give a difference experience depending on the choice, only different words.
But there is a second story! Who is Kinbote, really? Did he kill Shade? Where are the jewels? Are the index cards of the poem actually in the right order? Is Zembla even real? I recommend this frankly brilliant and insane paper to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, and it's not at all apparent from simply opening the book any more than Gwyndolin's story is from looking up the description of his crown.
You're welcome to avoid that, I honestly wouldn't ever consider watching Satantango again, but for anybody interested in Seiobo, the first chapter is available free here and has bitten quite a few of my friends with the bug.
Choose-your-own-adventure books have some similarities but are too limited. You could, in theory, write one that kept track of variables, had branches that intertwine deeply, etc., but nobody actually would. It's a huge difference, I'd say bigger than that between a comic book and a movie. I'm not sure what you mean by "experience" - if you mean words aren't an experience, I recall people experimenting with choose-your-own adventure DVDs, but those have even worse capability issues than the books.
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Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean here, but isn’t that just the entire field of literary criticism? A reader who isn’t perceptive enough or doesn’t put enough thought into what they read won’t be able to fully uncover all of the implications of what was written on the page. For a non-academic example, consider the painstaking work that Gwern put in in order to show that a certain enigmatic short story by Gene Wolfe is actually abouta town in which vampires “won” . And that’s just the most literal example of how new information or “lore” can be discovered in written stories by those who have superior “skill” in reading, to say nothing about higher-level concerns (i.e. rather than merely understanding what the work is saying, can I understand what the consequences of what it’s saying are, and whether or not I agree with them, and why?)
I was thinking that a game could present more author Text, while literary criticism can only offer alternatives through ambiguity.
I've had trouble understanding literary criticism before, so I intuitively see the additional text of a video game as more real (and therefore different) from literary implications. On reflection seems there's less difference than I thought
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