So far it feels like Samurai Skyrim on insane difficulty mode for no good reason.
The difficulty isn't as insane as it appears...it's not that bad if you overlevel. At the outset it looks daunting. Game gives you no hints, puts a very strong boss right in front of you where you start, etc. That boss isn't representative of the overall game, it's just there to put the Fear Of God into people.
How long have you been playing, and is it your first Fromsoft game?
It's very very different from Skyrim.
My advice is to find the camp full of knights. From the very outset, you go past the horseman boss, to the church. It has an important merchant, so it's a good base of operations. Then continue up that way to a camp, I think Stormhill Camp is the name. There are a couple of really good weapons on the wagons in the camp (jump up onto them and inspect their cargo to get a Zweihander and a Flail). The knights there can also drop the Brass Shield which is like, the best shield in the game. Or at least, I used it for the entire game. There are a couple of others that are better depending on builds, but a forged-up Brass Shield will deflect pretty much anything. Most importantly, that camp gives you a lot of practice fighting in this game, picking off foes, not getting cornered, using some stealth, etc etc. I'd, no joke, spend a couple hours there just playing around and getting more levels, or at least till the shield dropped.
Once you gain some levels and get good with the Zweihander or Flail (or Uchi since you're a Samurai*), another good early-game area to go to is the mine in the swamp to the south. Watch out for the dragon outside. That mine contains a ton of upgrade materials as ground spawns (gold crystals), plus the enemies can drop upgrade materials uncommonly. So that's another good place to practice and farm for a while. Then hit the Roundtable Hold and upgrade your weapon of choice to +5 or whatever it can get to on the first tier of upgrade mats, use the leftover mats on the Brass Shield.
* - For a Samurai, finding new weapons is less crucial because the Uchi is the best starting weapon any class gets. You can actually use that for like half the game without any issues. In my Samurai run, I used that until I got the Moonveil katana, then used that until I got Rivers of Blood, then eventually Hand of Malenia. ...and now I want to go get a second HoM in NG+ and run around dual-wielding those. Well, next time.
Everyone struggles at the beginning of their first Fromsoft game, and wonders why people like this junk so much. The first six hours or so of Bloodborne, I made like no progress, almost brought the game back to the store, and was actually angry about the whole thing. I actively rebelled against the "you just need to get good" mentality and ranted to people that I'd rather learn a musical instrument or something actually useful.
Then I gave it a few more hours and it clicked somewhere. By hour 10 I had "gotten it" and within the week it was my favorite PS4 game. Now Fromsoft is my favorite dev studio. It's difficult to get other people into these games, though, because everyone goes through that first 5-10 hour barrier of being unimpressed or warded off.