![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As we all know from movies like John Wick, revenge is sometimes all you need to get behind a protagonist in media like this. Sifu is a game centered around a tale of revenge. It delivered on its promises to offer some of the best hand-to-hand combat seen in the genre for some time, create compelling levels that are a joy to dive back into for collectibles and secrets, and, most importantly, give players the feeling of being a complete kung-fu wielding badass. Now that I have spent around 15 hours with the game and rolled credits, I am happy to say that Sifu did not disappoint. A game that blended stylish kung-fu gameplay with deep fighting mechanics and a unique take on the roguelite genre sounded right up my alley at the time. The game gives us a museum showcasing as much Asian art as humanly possible, a neon nightclub littered with red paper lanterns, and a drug lab where narcotics are manufactured from a mysterious flower in a level that otherwise just feels like a take on the apartment complex from Gareth Evans’s The Raid: Redemption.When I saw Sifu for the first time, I knew I had to play it. It’s easy enough to imagine a version of Sifu that lightens up on its most punishing elements, but its veritable parade of Eastern iconography is tougher to extricate. Indeed, beyond a couple of showy, psychedelic touches, this game’s look is unfortunately defined by an in-your-face “Oriental” shorthand. Not unlike the Uncharted and The Last of Us games, Sifu’s cinematic reference points tend toward the obvious and pedestrian, from an early take on the hallway fight from Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy to multiple shout-outs to Kill Bill, but minus the Shaw Brothers motifs that at least located Quentin Tarantino’s film within a specific cultural context. In terms of presentation, Sifu’s clearest reference point would seem to be Naughty Dog, whose games are similarly cinematic but don’t demand anywhere near the same level of inarguable precision. You might even miss the upgrade shrines because they blend in with so much of the non-interactive scenery, distinguished only by a white dot. Mostly, Sifu scans as a failure of interface design, given that it’s a game built on staring at various meters that’s also trying to call as little attention to them as possible. At the same time, such moments can feel almost totally random and leave you unable to pinpoint what you did differently and why it worked. In moments like these, you glimpse the game’s promise as you stumble upon the right rhythm and manage to mow through an enemy group. On some level, Sifu’s lack of clarity is consistent with its depiction of learning by doing, as players will discover as they go along that, say, knocking an enemy into the scenery will take an additional bite out of their structure meter. ![]() It’s distressingly easy to get caught up in a merciless cycle of failure, careening through middle age after a particularly nasty cluster of deaths. Sifu is inordinately punishing, even with unlockable shortcuts and the ability to replay a prior level so that you can start the next one at a more manageable age clearing the game when you start the third level at age 72 is theoretically possible, but you can’t learn any more skills past age 70, when the amulet can no longer bring you back. But if age is the best teacher, this game isn’t a particularly effective one. In Sifu, experience quite literally comes with age since, beyond a handful of shrines that provide a stat bonus, death is the main method to access the skill tree. You also start to wear more clothes, presumably because being old means that you’re cold all the time. And age you will, as your protagonist’s hair and-if you’re playing as the male character-beard grows longer. The skill tree is broken up into 10-year intervals, and after passing each milestone, a coin on the amulet will shatter to indicate that you’ve aged out of learning certain skills forever. Besting your killer lowers the counter, but falling in battle again will add another number and age you up by two years instead of just one. Once the health meter hits zero, your death counter gains a number and you’re brought back aged 21 instead of the starting age of 20. And these defeats will come often, because Sifu is built on parrying and timing to a degree that can feel brutally difficult, if not outright inaccessible.Īt first, the amulet’s toll is negligible. Your protagonist would have also died that night if not for a live-saving amulet that resurrects you after you fall in battle, aging you in the process. After that, the game handily splits the villainous martial artists up so that each may serve as the boss battle in a level to be navigated by the player character, the massacre’s lone survivor. Sloclap’s Sifu opens with a gang of assassins slaughtering the unwitting master of a Chinese dojo and the students under his charge. ![]()
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