Hands-on with Sometimes You Die
A game about death, reality, and games
Sometimes You Die's title is a reference to a couple of its themes.
Firstly, it's a morbid reassurance of our mortality. Cheerful, then.
Secondly, the 'sometimes' implies that death isn't finite. Death can re-occur. This understanding of death that we have in video games is touched upon in this platformer's opening scenes.
It's black and grey, slightly fuzzy. You control a square with a arrow inside it denoting the direction it's facing. You can move and jump.
But jumping over spike pits and up platforms is all secondary to the narration, which is supplied via text in the background of each screen and via a computerised voice-over.
What qualifies as a video game? Is it the category in the App Store? That it has rules? Perhaps because there is a challenge?
But Sometimes You Die isn't just a thought-provoking experience; it's a smartly designed platformer, too. This is the third 'theme' of the game's title.
You can't always get across the spikes without meeting death, you see. Luckily, your dead body will stay behind. You can then use it as a stepping stone.
Being a physics-based game, Sometimes You Die challenges you to balance the dead on spinning buzzsaws later on. Then, you'll be stacking them neatly up a vertical wall of spikes to use as a makeshift ladder.
Sometimes You Die forces you to plan every death you encounter, because dying in the wrong place can be a nuisance.
Fortunately, there's a button to reset all of the corpses in the screen. But this means starting your trail of the dead from scratch.
If you're looking for something different, I'd suggest giving Sometimes You Die a chance when it surfaces on iOS on March 27th for £1.49 / $1.99.