Horror game progress and model

I've been playing some Dark Souls 1 recently to get ready for Dark Souls 3 and it brought up a few questions, firstly, why is this game so addictive? And secondly, why aren't more games challenging? For anyone that doesn't know Dark Souls is a notoriously difficult game in which every enemy has a decent chance of killing you, and although its rage-educing gameplay can be infuriating at times, I really can't stop playing it.

It made me think about the game I'm currently working on, up until now I've very much left the gameplay at the bottom of the list and have focussed on the models and setting. Now however the gameplay is going to be one of the key elements, we're aiming to make the game both horrifically scary, and much more difficult than other games. It wont be impossible, but the player will really need to think about what he/she is doing to really advance, as well as knowing whether an enemy is worth attacking.

Finley and I are spending all of tomorrow morning creating models and other assets for the game, hopefully getting some form of playable mini-demo. We're both modelling and texturing at the moment without too many issues.

Earlier I made a table that could be used throughout the game, the model was fairly simple to make, but in my opinion it looks fairly nice.

Texturing it was again not very difficult, I've started taking more care with getting edges in line, so this took a little longer. I'd say from UV Unwrapping to a finished texture document took about 20 minutes. I had no issues with it and actually enjoyed trying to make it look slightly worn, I'm starting to notice improvements myself.

Here's what it looks like in the level I made in Unity.

It looks a bit under-saturated due to the lighting, however we're going to have lanterns and pit fires placed throughout the level, so it should resemble the render displayed above.

I'm looking forward to getting this all started properly, we have a good gameplay idea in place and should have no problem getting everything in place, it's just going to take a fair bit of work and time.