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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