Sifu

I kept coming back to Sifu well past the point where most games had lost me, not because it was generous, but because it was fair in a way that quietly gets under your skin. Sloclap built something compact and intentional here: five levels, five bosses, one aging body, and a combat grammar rooted in Pak Mei kung fu that demands you learn its vocabulary before you can speak a sentence. The whole thing hums with the atmosphere of classic martial arts cinema, from a first-level apartment block that reads as a clear love letter to The Raid, through to a hallway sequence that tips its hat directly to Oldboy. The soundtrack works the same register: understated, rhythmic, quietly urgent. It does not overexplain itself, and that restraint earns trust. The mechanical heart of the game is the structure system, where both you and every enemy share a posture meter that breaks under sustained pressure, much like Sekiro's but with its own texture. Light and heavy attacks chain into combos that you unlock and permanently bank across multiple runs. You can block, dodge, and parry, though the parry window is genuinely tight, closer to a fighting-game frame-count than a brawler's comfortable grace period. That tightness is a design statement, not an oversight. The Focus mechanic lets you burn a separate meter to slow time and deliver precise strikes or stunning sweeps, which becomes a genuine lifeline against the more aggressive boss phases. Environmental weapons, glass bottles, pipes, staves, even baseball bats, all show up with their own durability and move sets, and the game integrates the scenery into fights in ways that feel natural rather than gimmicky. Then there is the aging system, which is the thing everyone talks about and the thing that will split potential buyers cleanly in two. Each death adds years to your character. Die too many times in sequence and those years stack fast: a death counter that builds means each subsequent loss costs more. Older characters deal more damage but absorb less punishment, so the game shifts from forgiving to surgical the deeper you age. You start at twenty and the magic fades permanently at seventy. What this creates is a loop that refuses to randomise the levels (every enemy group is fixed, every room repeatable), so the game becomes a memory exercise and a precision test in equal measure. The payoff, running a level clean and arriving at the boss young, is one of the more quietly satisfying things a brawler has offered in recent years. Post-launch patches added a Student difficulty and modifiers including all-skills-unlocked-from-the-start options, which lower the floor without removing the wall. The criticisms are real and worth naming. The story is a revenge skeleton and nothing more; the detective board collectibles add lore texture but the narrative never genuinely interrogates its own premise. The camera fights you in tight corridors with a stubbornness that occasionally costs real health. Some boss attack patterns rely on memorisation over readable telegraphing, particularly the bosses who lean on ranged moves, and a handful of crowd-control situations expose the limits of the parry-centric combat when three enemies attack simultaneously from different angles. None of this is fatal, but none of it is invisible either. The Steam PC release in March 2023 also brought the Arenas mode, a separate challenge layer of curated encounter rooms with additional martial arts film references, which meaningfully extends the game for players who finish the main five levels and want a pure combat laboratory to work in. Sifu is built for the kind of player who logs a first run, gets humbled, and feels the pull to go back immediately rather than the urge to quit. It is not a wide game or a narrative one. It is a focused, handcrafted object that knows its own shape and does not apologise for it. If that sounds like a commitment you can live with, the return on that investment is real.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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