Sifu Review: Vengence Served Rigid

Sifu is built on parrying and timing to a degree that can feel brutally difficult, if not outright inaccessible.

Sifu
Photo: Sloclap

Sloclap’s Sifu opens with a gang of assassins slaughtering the unwitting master of a Chinese dojo and the students under his charge. 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. 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. 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.

At first, the amulet’s toll is negligible. 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. 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. 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. And age you will, as your protagonist’s hair and—if you’re playing as the male character—beard grows longer. You also start to wear more clothes, presumably because being old means that you’re cold all the time.

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. But if age is the best teacher, this game isn’t a particularly effective one. 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. 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.

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When caught up in such a cycle, all you can do watch your chances melt away and your abilities constrict as you die, which is scarcely compensated by the damage bonus that you get in exchange for reduced health. Worse, “game over” means losing any acquired skills unless you’ve scrounged enough experience to pay the steep cost that permanently unlocks one. This unforgiving reset-after-death approach suggests a roguelike, but roguelikes also remix their odds to provide combinations of variables that you may or may not fare better against. Sifu, though, stands rigid in its progression, and in doing so its penalties are needlessly severe.

Sifu would be a difficult game even with a more linear checkpoint system, since it asks you not only to constantly parry attacks but to parry many of them in quick succession. Sloclap’s Dark Souls-inspired Absolver also asks you to do this, but that game’s interface is clearer and its control scheme is much more sensibly spread out across the controller.

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Sifu maps the actions to guard, avoid, and parry all to a single button, an issue that’s only compounded by inadequate feedback for your moves. The visual and auditory indicators that you’ve done a move correctly are understated, opting for subtlety and style over basic clarity. It’s often unclear which action you’ve even performed by the standards of the game’s strict timing, since successful moves might still lose you a small chunk from the meters for your health and your structure—that is, the ability to continue parrying and blocking. The bosses, with their big health bars and their ability to shrug off attacks, are particularly infuriating.

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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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Indeed, beyond a couple of showy, psychedelic touches, this game’s look is unfortunately defined by an in-your-face “Oriental” shorthand. 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. 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.

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Though Sifu features a few dialogue choices and scenes throughout its campaign where you don’t have to fight anyone, its surface-level engagement with martial arts film iconography betrays a lack of humanity that feels typical of works created well outside of the culture that they intend to depict. The game’s story grouses about the downsides of seeking vengeance, but this is plainly the work of people who like to fast forward to the fight scenes.

The game was covered with a review code provided by Tinsley PR.

Score: 
 Developer: Sloclap  Publisher: Sloclap  Platform: PlayStation 4  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Drug Reference, Strong Language, Violence  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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