Some of You May Die first impressions: A divisively fun roguelike

Some of You May Die is an auto-battler roguelike, developed and published by Octavia Blue. The game follows a classic auto-battler roguelike format, tasking you with building up a mighty battalion of heroes, and it hooked its claws into me quicker than I expected.

While I don’t think Some of You May Die is going to be a hit for everyone, due to its learning curve and the fact that luck can seemingly play a role in succeeding, for the right roguelike sickos, it’ll be a delight. Here’s Kyusai’s first impressions of Some of You May Die, played on mobile.

Some of you may dislike Some of You May Die

In Some of You May Die, you’ll be facing off against waves of fantastical enemies, ranging from warlocks to otherworldly critters, building up an ever-increasing army to take down your foes and make it safely to the next level. 

The levels are split into biomes, like a frosty mountain or scorching desert, and there’s a cute animation between stages showing a party marching across the map. 

In-between each round, you’ll be able to pick upgrades for your heroes, purchase new members of your party, and enhance stats to give yourself the best chance of succeeding. Items, spells, heroes, and upgrades are randomized each turn, so you never know what you’re going to get.

As you pick up multiples of the same hero, you can drag and drop them on top of each other, stacking them up to create stronger iterations of the same hero. 

For example, if you purchase 4 priests and stack them on the same spot, they’ll merge and become a more powerful priest with better stats. They’ll also become visibly bigger on the battlefield, meaning you can easily see which heroes you’ve already upgraded at a glance, which I thought was a smart stylistic choice. 

The available heroes are standard fantasy fare – warlocks, summoners, tanks – and behave as you’d expect them to based on their tropes. Tanks soak up damage and deal beefy hits to enemies, while archers deal ranged damage.

To get the most out of your party, you’ll need to make sure you’re placing them in accordance with their skills and attack styles, along with their range.  

Alchemists aren’t attackers and they are squishier than their tanky counterparts, so they need to be placed out of harm’s way – but they also need to be able to reach their party members and throw potions. Positioning is key, and if you’ve got ranged DPS too far away or a tank in the back lines, your strategy will suffer.

Plenty of player freedom

One of my favorite things about Some of You May Die is that you can choose which enemies you want to face in each round, based on your own party set-up. 

There’ll be three different enemy parties presented to you for each round, getting increasingly stronger as you progress throughout the game and varying wildly in their own set-up and skill sets. For example, you may face a horde of gremlins, a mix of magic and melee enemies, or a massive enemy surrounded by a few little ones. 

I loved the level of freedom that this gave me as a player; this was enhanced by the presence of unlockable squad types and difficulty tiers on the main menu.

When you beat a run with the standard squad, you’ll unlock new squads to experiment with, including a glass cannon squad and a custom squad. There are six squads to unlock, including a random squad which I thought was a particularly fun addition, adding a heap of replay value to the game.

There are also difficulty modifiers to play with once you’ve unlocked them, increasing reroll cost, adding a constant health drain, or cutting your shop size down significantly. If you’re a fan of games like Order Automatica but love a good challenge, these’ll keep you busy for a good while.

I can see the gameplay loop in Some of You May Die being divisive, despite personally being a fan.

Getting the hang of what to upgrade and how to manage your resources does take time, and there is an element of luck with which enemies you get and what the shop presents you with. Personally, I like a little luck in my roguelikes, but I know this can be a sticking point for some players.

The visual style in Some of You May Die is simple but sweet, with charming pixel art sprites and pared back but vibrant worlds.

I did find the interface to be somewhat hard to parse on mobile – the text is very small – and there weren’t any options to change this. There were options to change the pixelated text into smooth text and lower graphics, but further accessibility options would’ve been ideal.

Performance-wise, Some of You May Die ran perfectly on my iPhone 13 Pro Max – there weren’t any glitches, bugs, or visual quirks to note. Thanks to the size, though, I do recommend playing the game on PC over mobile, though, particularly if you’re someone with bad eyesight like myself.

Some of You May Die is an enjoyable roguelike that’ll scratch the auto-battling itch for fans of the genre.

It’s not reinventing the wheel by any means with its gameplay loop and it doesn’t have much of a narrative, but it does what it says on the tin and I had a great time playing through it, particularly thanks to its grand selection of difficulty modifiers and enhanced player autonomy.

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