So I mostly don't want to reply to the vitriol beyond what I already have, but by most reasonable understandings of grimdark, I would contend that the Soulsborne games aren't particularly grimdark. They are a little tonally and very aesthetically dark most of the time, but that's not what grimdark is. Grimdark is Guts dragging himself over broken glass for months trying to protect Casca from the demons that they both attract and not even being able to sleep more often than like once a week because there's always some fucking phantom sneaking up trying to eat their souls or something. Grimdark is oriented around animosity and squalor as much as powerlessness and morbidness.

Yes, I did use Berserk as a contrasting example.

Dark Souls is extremely gothic in its writing in the sense that it's perpetually mournful of basically everything in the world because the world is already mostly dead and the rest of it is dying. You can say that's tedious or tacky or whatever and that's fine, I'm not telling you to like it, but it has a very different tone from what "grimdark" suggests. If most of Dark Souls was like Blight Town, you'd have a good case, but most of the time you're in ruins or natural environments fighting off echoes of the past while reading epitaphs. On a story level, the struggle isn't dedicated opponents or even really your own weakness nearly so much as it is the entropy of the universe.

Yes, the intro cutscene to DS2 is in many respects grimdark. Go look at another one, literally any of the other ones.

Okay Bloodborne is, well, ironically less gothic in the sense I described but it's oriented around cosmic horror, the "grimdark" is mostly a veneer that you get baited on before the werewolves start having 4 mouths and tentacles. It is very blood blood nightmare blood though, but the "nightmare" part is pretty cool