I'd be interested in reading the very first Western previews/reviews/articles/blog & forum posts that contributed to the rise of Demon's Souls' popularity in the West. If you have some sources, let's see them.
My provisional hypothesis (without having played any of these games) is that the game is very good at making you feel as if you've overcome a tough challenge, whereas in fact you've just mostly been grinding, so that even an effeminate hipster who only plays "indie" games will feel like he is cool. This is the exact challenge model that dungeon crawlers of old used, and that's precisely what Demon's Souls is, only 1) in real-time action, like Dungeon Master, 2) with only one avatar, unlike Dungeon Master, and 3) with production values through the roof, unlike contemporary dungeon crawlers. So it makes sense why gamers would take to it, because the idea behind the game is solid, but it makes no sense why the hipsters would flock to it unless my challenge=grinding hypothesis is correct. Even then, the dungeon crawler is such a primitive, esoteric genre that, even in its modern actiony manifestation it's the last type of game that you'd expect hipsters to flock to. So I would like to read the very first hipsters/journlolists who advertised it and try to figure out what they were thinking (more precisely, what they were feeling, because effeminate males, like women, don't really think). So if you have some relevant material in mind, go ahead and link them and we'll go through them and discuss them.