If your game's difficulty comes from being poorly programmed (enemies able to compenetrate walls and hit you through them while you can't do the same), and relying on sneaky douchebag tactics like a hidden enemy coming out of nowhere to push you off a ledge or a massive boulder dropping on you while you can't see it cause the camera can't angle itself all the way up there, or enemies attacking you from off screen, it's not a difficult game. It's just an asshole game.
Genuine difficulty is when you ARE aware of the threat and CAN react to it, and it just comes down to whether or not you have the execution to pull it off.
That's why soulslike games (the vast majority of them, not all, but definitely From Software ones and a whole lot of others that try to emulate them) are dogshit games, totally undeserving of the success they've gotten, purely gameplay speaking.