still, a lack of tutorial for your mechanics is not good design, you need SOME form of explaination of mechanics in your games, look at Dark Souls, the way that was designed is how you should design your first area if you're looking to make a challenging game, leave some form of hint or even a manual type thing on the main menu to give the player direction, and a reason to continue/start playing. just plopping a player in the middle of a level with no idea how to play will just make a player rage quit and un-install you game, work the game around difficulty, and create a challenging experience, but don't make an artificial difficulty just to make a difficult game, that just causes rage and hatred towards your game. A good example of bad game design that is "Difficult" would be Ghouls and Ghosts, or the original Castlevania games.