I hate that souls-like became synonymous with snappy combat and long combos you have to reactionally dodge or parry.
When you look at DeS it was about making a believable world that doesn't beat you over the head with storytelling and having the bosses be hard enough and the consequences of failure severe enough to warrant caution.

Nothing more but also nothing less.

Leves should be designed to not only be slogged through once. There should be a focus on making the world fun to traverse. If you have to fast travel everywhere, the world is too large to be interesting and the developers should be capable of designing the levels to be interconnected and looping back on themselves.

The world should also have an in universe explanation for why you character gets reborn and should react accordingly. If the boss constantly repeats it's intro dialogue the developer didn't put thought into this and therefor I am not going to care about their world.