At first I started the game on PC but I urge everyone who has one to play it on console, as it feels most at home with the DualSense in your palms. Howie Lee’s lethal, thumping soundtrack and the sheer range of the Dualsense’s haptics, from the pitter-patter of rain to the thwack of a meaty staff – elevate Sifu into a true immersive delight on PS5. The stylized art direction and carefully designed environments pair well with some dashing cinematography to create fights that feel like movie scenes. Many clips were saved as I pulled off strings of takedowns while catching metal pipes in midair, pushing stunned strikers off cliffs and clobbering enemies wholesale, haptics reverberating in my palms. But once you get the rhythm right, Sifu feels unbelievably good to play. Getting overwhelmed is easy when enemies appear from nowhere, as Sifu starts to pepper in the supernatural to augment the terrifying preamble to a big boss. Groups of bodyguards lurk behind wafer-thin walls instead of using an obvious approach, and suddenly each battle is psychological as well as physical. Hench enemies with bladed weapons guard gorgeous exhibits, each with their own combat puzzles to solve, like hanging Kunai and copious bulbs that explode with colour when they strike enemies. I know this because I too slipped into a fighting formula as I approached The Museum, which is Sifu’s best (and most daunting) level. The game is designed so you can’t just cheese your way through with the most reliable tactics and there’s a literal brick wall in the middle of the game – its third boss fight – where you’ll have to eat some serious humble pie if you’ve been lazy. It’s a dirty little mechanic that goads you into being a better player and engaging with the many intricacies of Sifu’s combat system. This means many of the game’s best abilities are only available to players who manage to stay under 29. But get this… certain skills and bonuses have age caps. Sifu also grants meaning to your more geriatric runs by letting you farm XP which you can use to permanently unlock skills across all of your attempts. Explore a bit more and you may find ways to trivialise tricky scenes and propel yourself into the late game. Sifu has a detective board a la Deathloop that doubles as a lore nugget serving platter and a way to unpick its levels. You might get lucky in The Club as a pensioner and find a key that opens a shortcut for your future runs when you’re a youngster. It’s a smug twist that turns Sifu into a magnificent roguelike, one that dwells on all of the hot genre’s best features. So you go back to The Squats, permanently trying to improve your earlier runs so you can – literally – make your life easier across the game’s five brutal levels. Because when you wake up in The Club with long hair and wrinkly skin, the doorman might send you straight to hell in a handbasket. 64 might be your best attempt at The Squats, but it won’t be your last. When you beat a level in Sifu, the game saves the age you did it at, along with any bonuses you chose along the way. But what happens when you do figure out that nasty boss at the end of The Squats? And when you die for real, you lose all the bonuses and skills that you unlocked along the way, and are forced to start the level again. You’re gone forever if you push past 75, death counter mitigations aside. But if you fail to do that and you die again, your Death Counter will rise to 2. If you manage to KO the person who took you down or kill a string of enemies without dying, you can reset your Death Counter to 0. Get your ass kicked and you will wake up aged 21, with your Death Counter set to 1. The game’s first level, The Squats, starts you at 20 years old. You see, every time you die in Sifu, you can come back to life immediately, but you wake up older. My first death hurt, sure, but my grimace quickly turned to a shit-eating grin as I figured out what was going on. The premise sounds strictly linear, but Sifu’s many twists and turns make it far more complex. A set of kung fu kingpins murdered your father when you were just a child, and you’re going to fight your way through them to avenge him, armed with a mysterious power. Starting in media res, you’re quickly introduced to the game’s controls and narrative through a brilliantly paced tutorial that sets up Sifu’s stakes.
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