Do devs compare their games to dark souls or is it only "journalists"

I wish there was a dev that instead of actually marketting their game they just said "It's the dark soul of X" and maybe listed some stupid reasons that'd be funny "The incredible difficulty of X might make you think about Dark Souls. It isn't unfairly hard ; it's challenging" Then it turns out it's a puzzle game where you can't really die or anything that would make it reasonable to compare it to DS