That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought of it that way before but you’re right. As much as I love Sekiro and Dark Souls they don’t really encourage you to do better, more just punish you for messing up.

In Demon’s Souls, when you died the first time you were stuck at 50% max health until you regained human form, and dying in human form darkened the world tendency.

In Dark Souls, if you got cursed your health was capped at 50% until you removed the curse which wasn’t free. In the original build of the game the curses stacked all the way to 1/16th of your max health but thankfully they changed that.

In Dark Souls II you lost a fraction of your max health after each death until you were down to 50%.

In Bloodborne, your heals didn’t replenish after death so each time you healed and died you lost that heal and would have to go around finding more heals.

Dark Souls III wasn’t too punishing, I can’t think of anything at the moment that was super punishing about that game. It was my go-to recommendation for beginners until Elden Ring for that reason.

In Sekiro, every time you died you lost half your money and couldn’t get it back. You also had a chance to make a random NPC sick which would prevent you from continuing their quest until you healed them, which wasn’t easy or cheap. The chance to get someone sick also increased the more you died. I think the baseline was 13% chance to get someone sick, and increased every subsequent death until it capped at 50% each death, though there was a way to reset that number.

Elden Ring is kind of like Dark Souls III in that it doesn’t really punish you for dying, which I think is the right approach. If you go with Elden Ring and love it, and do the DLC and love that too, I’d strongly recommend going to Dark Souls III next. It’s the closest to Elden Ring.