Any good proto-Soulslikes? Games that typify the genre that came before Dark Souls?

And I don't just mean Demon's Souls and King's Field. I don't think the genre itself is super unique, as much as it was (originally) a kind of return to form that simply hit at just the right moment. Plenty of games long before DS were similar in gameplay and sometimes even tone.

Like Soul Reaver, which is extremely similar with the combat, non-linear yet linear through metroidvania type tools level design, and even a respawn system where instead of loading a save, you come back with everything you did still done but now you're somewhere else and forced to backtrack.

I've kinda exhausted all the new options and I still crave more so now I'm looking back to the past to see if there's anything I missed out on when it was new. The only thing I could think of off the top of my head was the Soul Reaver series, tho.