It's mostly the same in the previous games, but without Torrent to avoid enemies and grab your souls. You had to navigate the same enemies on foot again, which isn't hard once you're used to the games. You can easily run past everything.

You're right it is fairly toothless, compared to a game where you reload a save. People like to pretend the Souls games are hard, but they aren't. They're very forgiving, but challenge you. You always make progress, which isn't true when you load a save which is what most games used to do.

Bioshock though, and some games of that time, just had no penelty. Bioshock you die, all enemies stay dead and you keep everything you picked up. You just respawn with full stats and keep all progress.

Souls has a great middle ground of keeping progress but also having some minor penelty to death.