On some level this works in the game’s favor.
The developers have spoken quite plainly about their love of Chinese cinema, and how they wanted to fulfill the power fantasy of a Jackie Chan film, pitting your lone guy against hundreds of others.
SIFU IN CHINESE MOVIE
Like I noted in my preview, Sifu is a kung fu revenge movie disguised as a game. However, this was also where the game struggled the most for me. While the gameplay is a joy, the aesthetics at play in Sifu are just as important to the experience. When all of this works in tandem, it can make later runs of the game an exciting balancing act between efficiency and power. Defeating certain tougher enemies will bring that death counter low, giving you a fighting chance to stay young. Once you cross 70, your character will die one last time and you’ll be forced to pick up the run again from the age you began the level at, losing any progress that was not permanent. With age comes greater strength but also waning health, and aging too quickly has the chance to rob you of opportunities to master many skills. When you die in Sifu, you’re resurrected by a magic pendant but age about as much as you’ve gone down. Learn a move once and you can use it until you die, but repeatedly invest XP that you earn into it and you can eventually carry it across your future runs.
Roguelite tendencies also carry over to your skills and abilities. Come back to a level after finding a keycard in it, for example, and you can open certain doors or take an elevator that’ll allow you to go right to the final fight. Clues reveal tips for taking out mini-bosses and background information on some of the people you’re hunting, but most importantly they open up shortcuts and the beginnings of a roguelite structure. Levels are littered with clues that go onto a detective board in a wuguan that oversees the city and acts as the game’s hub. Sifu’s gameplay has a surprising amount of layers and loops. Combat has heft but your character feels nimble enough to dart around, and making use of the environment while also doling out blow after blow never stops being enjoyable or necessary since Sifu happily humbles players who recklessly speed through it. Perhaps the single most pleasing thing about a fight is reading an opponent, dodging and landing a heavy counter that sounds like it dislodges them from space and time for a second. A well-timed block will also earn you a parry, opening up a window for a counter. Relatively simple combo strings unleash torrents of fists or roundhouse kicks that never fail to land with a satisfying thud. It is also as “easy to learn, hard to master” as it gets in a fighting game, which Sifu indisputably feels like. If the game’s combat is at all successful-which it resoundingly is-it is because this form comes to miraculous life and looks and feels great in action. Rather than combine forms into a single unique one, though, this game hones in on one, Pak Mei, and makes that its core. Sifu, like Sloclap’s last game Absolver, is all about mastery of the martial arts. Sifu sounds kind of cool, doesn’t it? That’s because it kind of is. In their pursuit of these culprits, your character grows bolder in their mastery of kung-fu and potentially even grows older as the journey pushes them to their limits across a fictional Chinese city. Those five assailants have been wielding the power of those talismans ever since, embedding themselves into society at both high and low stations, which makes the task of finding them just a little more stressful than a friendly knock or kick at the door. Eight years later, and now 20 years old, your character embarks on a journey to avenge their family by hunting down the five people who were there that fateful night and made off with the talismans they were in search of. In Sifu, you play as a young kung-fu student who watches their master and family be murdered by another former student. The point is there are any number of things about Sifu that cuts what could be an enjoyable game off at the knees. Maybe it’s that they feel like a stranger to the story and setting of the game. Maybe it’s that when they do utter something, it’s altogether too short or inconsequential to have any importance. Maybe part of the problem is that Sifu’s hero, a gruff kung fu student, barely says a word on their life-consuming quest for revenge. I can’t make out what it wants to say and who it serves. I can hear the bass of the club I’ve fought through a dozen times, the familiar clink of pipe against bone and even the flurry of fists I launch to eliminate another opponent, but I can’t hear the game under that.
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