Interestingly I’d say Elden Ring is the most forgiving when it came to the “death penalty” you mention compared to all the other titles. There were far more rest points and things were so much more interconnected so you can stroll through/around most of the enemies to get back to where you died. Not always but a lot of times.

Also I found that really using your summons (especially mimic!) really helped with the difficulty. Also using magic makes life way easier. A lot of people just tend to go for the pure melee build which is making life really hard for yourself.

Dying and losing your runes in Elden Ring isn't as big a deal as you think. The runes you collect from general enemies throughout the game areas are mostly inconsequential across the whole length of the game. The bulk of your rune income is earned by killing bosses, and there's almost always a grace to spend those runes after you down a boss.

I used to get the same anxiety as you when playing Souls-likes. Once I accepted that losing my runes a few times is inevitable when navigating an area for the first time, that anxiety lifted and I could focus on just exploring and having fun.

Dark souls 1 or the remaster is still worth playing. The map design is once-in-a-lifetime good. There is a pretty hefty penalty like in other souls games, but it's just getting hollowed and losing some souls. DS3 is also good, maybe a more refined version of 1, but I personally don't think the world is as cohesive with the loading screens.

The trick is to just get used to being hollowed all the time and spending souls asap when you get them. You don't lose gear when you die, and gear is pretty important. The real progress comes from learning how to deal with each enemy though, and that comes from dying. I guess it sort of boils down to "git gud", even though that wasn't what I was trying to say here lol.

Death is another obstacle in all the soulslike I've tried. I've learned to not put so much stock in valuing souls/xp as they come and go, but more important is upgrading gear/learning move sets

If you are looking for "learn fight, get better, epic win" without much of a death penalty, maybe look at Monster Hunter?

It's not the same as a Souls game - not much world exploration, not much plot, zero gothiness - but it is 3D Fantasy Boss Fights: The Game. With 14 genuinely different weapon classes to choose from.

And if you faint three times and fail the quest, all you've lost are the consumables you spent on the attempt. (If you give up early and bail, you haven't even lost that.)

Try celeste and super meat boy if you want a skillful platformer with low penalty.

Elden Ring was my first Souls like game, and the biggest thing for me was to stop worrying about "losing" progress. You end up with so many opportunities to get runes that I never felt like I had to grind once and leveled up naturally as I played the game.

Maybe try Hades or Dead Cells if you like roguelites/roguelikes? Fundamentally different genre but gives me a lot of the same vibes. You inevitably die every run, but you keep all the meta-progression/upgrade resources you found during that run. So really, dying actually just gives you a chance to spend those resources to get stronger rather than taking away your progress.

Roguelites sound like a good fit for you in general if you like challenging, arcadey games that don't punish you too severely for dying. It's usually expected that you die a lot lol

Maybe you would like Tunic, it's souls-like but you do not lose all your currency on death and you can adjust the difficulty in several ways

It's a 2D Metroidvania-type game but Ender Lilies is the closest game I can think of to that delivered the same sort of challenges as the Souls games, like having to sometimes fight a boss battle dozens of times before you finally learn the patterns, without a disheartening death penalty or needing to go back to retrieve anything (you do return to your last checkpoint with respawned enemies though). It's admittedly a little rough around the edges especially with some questionable level designs (In one spot I had the hardest time spotting the waterfalls over the background - but also I played it on a small Steam Deck screen so that might not have helped) - also it's not a terribly original setting/story but I still liked it overall.

You can even get an item in Elden Ring called the Twiggy Cracked Tear about a third of the way through that lets your Physick flask grant the same effects as a Sacrificial Twig for 3 minutes. Once you get that, the stress of losing Runes can be greatly diminished.

Simply drink it prior to crossing a fog wall or at a difficult point on the path to Rune retrieval.

If that's not enough, and you're on PC, you can download a simple mod off Nexus which eliminates Rune loss on death entirely.

If like the "beat your head against the wall until you win", but dont care too much about the rpg elements and losing your progress, Furi is a great game.

The game is JUST boss fights, so there's no trekking back to the boss every time you die. But the actual bosses are brutal, multi-stage journeys that scratch that same itch that Souls games do.