a pretty good 2D dark souls inspired game, not so much a good metroidvania, but that doesn't detract from the experience at all

while theres a few odd hitboxes here and there, some odd audio balancing, story explanation that gets thrown on you very rapidly at the start with no breathing room, frustrating boss fights (especially on the rematches) and some lacking areas, death's gambit is a very good game held up massively by death himself as well as the antagonists, some absolutely outstanding stuff in here at points

the game gets better as it goes on, with the opening being much weaker than the rest of the game with boss fight quality *generally* improving as the game goes on. the only exceptions being some heroic boss fights, which can be fun but usually feel too overtuned to the point of being obnoxiously difficult or more specifically giving you a very small window to take out a spawned enemy during the fight before the boss returns, which if both are on you at once it becomes basically impossible as the movement and general combat of this game is not equipped for something like that, forcing you to rush down spawns asap which gates you out of doing some of these fights at lower levels, giving you the most blatant form of dps checks i think ive seen which is a bit of a shame. it feels very satisfying to use different builds and classes to blitz through bosses despite being underpowered relative to where the game suggests you should be, so to have some bosses include mechanics and segments that seemingly dont allow for this is a shame, but not a deal breaker as the main contributors to this are at the very end of the game, meaning you'll be as strong as you can be at that point

if you can get past some of the oddities and brutal difficulty, death's gambit is a great game that manages to stick out more than i was expecting it to

8/10