I have only played like... three of them, I think?

Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree was a lot of fun. Out of the ones I've played it's probably my favourite, even though it's by no means a revolutionary game that is going to blow someone's mind. What I liked was that it felt like 90% 2D Soulslike and 10% Metroidvania. I struggle with platforming and so I liked that there really wasn't much of difficult precision platforming here. The character building was fun with a light PoE-inspired skill tree and multiclassing and it was in general just good clean gaming and a smooth ride that you don't have to think too hard about. Story is whatever but there are some okay characters. The vampire lord has some hilarious over the top voice acting and the goldsmith Yrsa is genuinely pretty funny.

Blasphemous has some of my favourite art direction and world building in all of Souls. The twisted Spanish catholic lore is just phenomenal, the music is wonderful, pixel art is beautiful, story is interesting... as a piece of art I adore it. I didn't have all that much fun playing it, though. It has a lot of platforming, with instant kill hazards everywhere. It also has some really janky and poor detection for ledge/ladder grabs that lead to very frustrating deaths. And it has some of that DS2 "fuck you, player" about it too. Lots of enemy placement that deliberately prevents you from rushing through areas, which is unfortunate because there is also a lot of backtracking and limited fast travel. It may be the game I'm most conflicted about overall. I love it, but I hated playing it.

GRIME is a fantastic game that I just cannot get into. I think again this is because it's heavy on the Metroidvania part of Soulsvania. There is a ton of platforming, although less clunky than in Blasphemous. The lack of fast travel (at least so far) also makes it feel annoying to play, as the world is pretty large and there is a lot of backtracking. The story is also rather weird, and while I love the art direction and think the world building is cool the plot hasn't really hooked me either. I don't know. I pick it up every now and then and play for like 45 minutes but I never get hooked. I have I think 9 hours total playtime over the last few months and beat a couple of bosses but it never sticks. Which is weird because I can tell it's a good game.

Salt and sanctuary

It is Hollow Knight. I played it before I knew about Dark Souls and even the word "soulslike". It was the first game I have ever played that required significant brain-usage and practice to beat. Its art direction is also impossible to love. Before this my idea of high quality games were things like Grand Theft Auto. And now only FromSoftware games I haven't played (and gotten all achievements in; yeah I am pretty passionate about games I like 😁) are the PlayStation exclusives. Luckily ShadPS4 exists, so I plan to try those very soon as well.

Also would probably pick Hollow Knight.

Besides the gameplay, the horror motif common from both soulslikes and metroidvanias pulls all the way to melancholy in it (a rare thing afaik), environmental storytelling is so rich it feels like the authors have the world fully fleshed out and constrained only by what makes sense to put in a single game, characters speak like their dialogues are translated which gives a foreign feel, and the OST... 👌

As a side note, Silksong is a solid 8/10. Hornet even feels like she starts like a slightly modified Knight, though she deviates into her own style (or rather styles) further on. And the game does that in several areas, like it tries to be different from HK wherever it can without breaking the world's rules, filling the gaps it feels like.