It's a decent game. Polished better than many of its type. Although I feel like a lot was missing from it.
With the name "Death Count", I was expecting an actual death counter to be logically utilized in some way that changed the levels or the character's abilities, especially with the second level's message that says "Touch the spikes to score extra points." I realized quickly the game mechanics were not as clever as the dialogue and that this is just your typical platformer.
The volume of the individual sound effects is surprisingly unbalanced. Some sounds, like the tone when you click on a button in the menu and the sound when the protagonist dies, are very quiet, as is the ambient music. Other sounds, like the metallic clanking of the moving spiked blocks and the cracking noise that the walls make when they start moving, are irritatingly loud. There's almost nothing inbetween, either.
The controls can be a little awkward at times. I noticed that if you hold down the jump key, you jump in the air, which makes sense, but if you let go of the jump key when you're back on the ground again, you jump back up in the air. I don't see why both pressing and releasing a key have the same function in slightly different instances, so I found that sometimes I didn't jump when I wanted to.
I was really annoyed with the overly sensitive collision detection of the main character. Even when he's just standing in place, he's not touching the ground. It wasn't always the challenging nature of the levels that led to constant death, but the mere fact that the main character can get killed by spikes that aren't even touching him. That's faulty design for a game that's based around avoiding obstacles and making precise jumps.
But I can't even tell if that's what this game was about. It felt like this game didn't know what it wanted to be. Some of the early levels were misleading jokes, and a few scattered levels were about strategic puzzle-solving. Paired with the eerie song selection, it seemed like this was supposed to be something haunting and deep, but then the game turned into pixel-perfect agility trials after the inclusion of the spiked wall. I also don't get what the physics engine was for. That seemed sort of flimsy and unnecessary for a tile-based game of this build, and it didn't match up with the rest of the retro atmosphere.
I will say that the game kept my interest long enough to play through all the levels. In actuality, that might not be saying much, since this is game is a very short-lived experience (in more ways than one). It's generic, inconsistent, and frustrating for the wrong reasons, but it is certainly a step up from unfair platformers that have no sense of skill or difficulty progression.