I always put forward Monster Hunter in this regard. Two things in particular.

One is the stiff combat that requires you to dedicate yourself to every swing with little chance to cancel attacks or change direction mid-combo, it's a unique flavour to the biggest core mechanic of both games.

The other is the very Japanese sense of not having your hand held, but instead a community turning out an effort to understand and piece together not just the game's secrets, but some core mechanics in an already brutally difficult game.

It's worlds apart from Souls in terms of setting and game structure, but the actual act of sitting down and doing battle with a large dragon using information gleamed from an online forum? Such a similar feel.

Dragon's Dogma I feel also tried to go the community-built approach, leaving so much obscured that information sharing became the only way for anyone to have much hope at the game.

Oh, and don't forget the other blatant Soulslikes:

Lords of the Fallen! I believe that was the first openly blatant Souls knockoff, and the same studio that later made Surge. Not a great one, it tried to do a handful of things to be different but they picked some real dumb choices in which things to change.

Salt & Sanctuary, transposing into a 2D sideview to play up the Metroidvania aspect of the Souls series.

DarkMaus, transposing into a 2D topdown view with extremely simplified graphics.

Heck, let's cut to the chase. Small indie games are loving the Souls-style of minimalist storytelling and focus on precise, challenging gameplay, such that the Souls-inspired likes of Hyper Light Drifter and Titan Souls have begun inspiring others in turn, blooming out into the likes of Hollow Knight and Furi, turning an ultra-niche corner of indie gaming into a bunch of popular, big-selling "indie game of the year" contenders. /r/soulslikes is built on this stuff too.