Sifu review

Sifu opens in a dojo, on a dark and stormy night. We get a murdered master and a young pupil, cowering in a cupboard, watching the deed through a crack in the door. Immediately, we brace ourselves for the good company of a hundred clichés. Needless to say, the kid will grow up, hone his kung fu, and hunt down the killers. This spirit-leeching quest will add years to his life, and he will realise that revenge is not best as a coldly served dish but as something to grow out of and cast aside—though not before dispensing it with relish across a few furiously choreographed hours. But things are not quite as they appear, and Sifu has surprises to spring.

First, we begin playing not as the kid but as the principal assailant—a horse-like brute, with a long face and a dripping mop of dark hair—and the initial felling falls to us. A nice twist, saddling us with mechanical guilt while teaching us the controls. Second, the child, whom we play as for the rest of the game, does grow up, but not before being slayed moments after the old man. Courtesy of an amulet, he is able to wake from death as though it were a power nap, and each time he does he gets older. His mission really will add years to his life. It’s a clever metaphor, treating vengeance like a transaction, divesting it of the usual blood-riling passion and lending it the dispiriting air of debt management, as the empty years are inscribed into the lifeless ledger of our hero’s days.

It’s also a restorative spin on the Roguelite, that heaviest of genres. Death is hardly perma, but it isn’t without cost; it accumulates, like interest or like dust, each time you expire. Each death is worth one year; die thrice with an unwiped slate, and the next time you resurrect you will have aged by three years. The wiping is done by besting powerful enemies in hand-to-hand (or, preferably, bottle-to-head) combat. The developer is Sloclap, a French studio (comprised of former Ubisoft Paris employees, who worked on Watch Dogs and the Ghost Recon series), whose debut was another martial arts action-R.P.G., Absolver. For Sifu, Sloclap has looked to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. That game, too, featured a posture meter, which governed each opponent’s guard and could be filled to breaking. And it also allowed us to cheat our end, though the toll was wrought not on its protagonist but on the land, and in the lungs of those around him, as they succumbed to a respiratory rot. Fitting how FromSoftware’s game, years on, continues to loom and lengthen.

Here, you start at age twenty, and with every decade your health bar will diminish and your physical strength will swell. Moreover, the lines of your face will deepen, and your hair—which at the outset is a neatly tied top knot of jet black—will flow and pale to an ashen white, like the wake of a spectre. Sifu is about preserving as much youth as possible, but, during a doomed attempt, I would often do a little ghost recon: pushing on recklessly, a dead man punching, to uncover the layouts of levels, the keys, the shortcuts, in the knowledge that I would soon re-haunt the place in better health.

The combat is of the palm-moistening school that prevailed in The Raid, in which the romance of stylised violence was cracked like a nose bone. The publicity notes for Sifu tell us that all clashes were reviewed, “to ensure an explosive and unique Kung Fu experience,” by Ben Colussi, a master of Pak Mei kung fu. Not having studied in China under Lao Wei San, as did Mr. Colussi, I can’t vouch for its veracity, but I can tell you that it doesn’t want for explosions. There are light and heavy attacks, upper- and lower-body dodges, blocks, parries, combos, and a growing sense that one is learning—that the rhythms of battle are being rapped into one’s head. The coup of Sifu is that this process mirrors that of the hero; I was continually tempted to ditch my progress and start afresh, furnished with new knowledge at the expense of a little more life.

You pursue your targets—of which there are five, in varying shades of ill repute—through the quarters of a fictional Chinese city, from its begrimed housing projects to its purple-lit nightclubs and air-conditioned art galleries. Clearly, Sloclap is enthralled by Asian martial arts cinema. Fans of Oldboy will smile at the stately, side-on procession of the camera, as you clobber your way along a seedy corridor. Likewise, anyone with a soft spot for Jackie Chan will be swept away at the sight of a weaponisable broom. The person to whom Sifu is perhaps most indebted, when it comes to style, is Genndy Tartakovsky, the Russian-American animator best known for Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack. That cartoon centred on another warrior harried by chronology—not greyed by its sudden surges but hurled through it by a cunning foe. Tartakovsky’s slashes of ink and colour told of nowhere in particular; you never emerged from an episode with a sense of location, rather that you had been furled, like Jack, in the flatness of time.

Likewise, the hero of Sifu patrols an idea of a city, given to sudden injections of surrealism. The first boss you encounter is a machete-clutching botanist, cooking up drugs for a street gang; during the second phase of this fight, the factory you are in shoots up into a bamboo forest. The back rooms of the nightclub are stoked into visions of a blazing village, matching the rasping glow of the cigarette in one enemy’s mouth. What gives? Is Sloclap paying homage to the work of Zhang Yimou? I will never shake the image, in Hero, of yellow leaves darkening, on a blood-dimmed tide, in sympathy with a character’s fall. Maybe the visions in Sifu lie in the traumatised mind of the main character, who remains more elusive than any of his foes. The game’s tagline ponders, “Is one life enough to know kung fu?” But, in the fractured figure of its hero, a deeper realisation occurs. It may not be enough to know yourself.

Developer: Sloclap

Publisher: Sloclap

Available on: PlayStation 5 [reviewed on], PlayStation 4, PC

Release Date: February 8, 2022

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