Sloppy.

Sifu is one of few games on Backloggd that has fewer total plays that it does people who are planning on playing it. At the time of writing, I'm following 36 people; of those, two have played Sifu, and nine have it either wishlisted or on their backlog. Most of the games I've seen on here do not have numbers like that. Sifu is a very obvious outlier, though pinning down exactly why leaves me kind of stumped; it's been a game that I was looking forward to playing for a long time, but I can't remember where I first saw it or why I was excited to play it. I have to imagine that most Sifu stories are similar. It might just be the fact that it was locked to the Epic Games Store for about a year on PC, and the people who wanted it then put it aside until it could get released elsewhere and then never got around to playing it. Regardless, I come to you all now as someone who was like you, just days prior. I wishlisted Sifu, it sat on that wishlist for however long it's been on there, and I've finally broken free of the vortex to play it for myself. With these new eyes and this new perspective, I can tell you this: don't bother.

I got the feeling I was going to be in for some shit when, about five minutes into the first level, you walk into a hallway and are immediately treated to the Oldboy shot. Great. I love it when a bunch of French people cobble together all five of the movies they've ever seen where a fistfight happens in the hopes of making something that can come together in the edit. You ever seen The Raid? How about Kill Bill (not Lady Snowblood, since nobody actually watches movies made before the new millennium)? Have you ever wanted to play a facsimile of some of the fight scenes from those movies but with enemies who can shrug off every hit you throw at them? Haven't you wanted to see some mook slowly get chipped down over the course of a full minute before he powers up and then takes another full minute of chipping away at before finally going down? No? "Part of the appeal of those movies that are being referenced is that those fight scenes against swarms of people are brutal and fast", you say? Huh? No, what you liked about The Bride squaring off against O-Ren wasn't the fact that they only landed two strikes total between both of them; you just liked that it took place in the snow. The action itself doesn't have the fun bounce of something like Police Story or Fong Sai Yuk, nor does it have the grit of the new wave of Indonesian action films like The Night Comes for Us or Headshot. It's just this gray paste of not enough influences and not enough understanding, swirled together into something that feels somehow uninspired in spite of the obvious inspirations which act as the glue between scenes.

Much like Sekiro, the enjoyment of the moment-to-moment action is regularly brought down by blatant technical issues like the camera constantly clipping into the fucking walls and making it so you can't see what's happening. Unlike Sekiro, though — and unarguably worse for it — is the fact that Sifu doesn't have a lock-on. It's got that DmC: Devil May Cry soft lock-on stuff where you mostly gravitate towards the closest enemy, though this is never consistent. Sometimes an enemy will fly in from off-screen like they're hitting Bob Beamon's 29-foot Olympic long jump, and the game often isn't ready to change your target direction for you. Given that you as the player have zero control over who you're trying to look at in any given moment, this compounds an already-frustrating set of mechanical problems. I feel like I'm riding a bike with a rusted-out chain.

Hell, I didn't like Sekiro, but even I can admit that the dual health-and-stagger bars for enemies was an interesting concept. The less health an enemy had, the slower they recovered stagger, which made it almost inevitable that you'd break their guard so long as you could get enough good hits in. Whittling down their health bars made it easier to win a battle of attrition; they have their resources, and you're expected to grind down all of them to deliver the kill. Sifu does not do this. It has enemy health bars, it has enemy stagger bars, but neither one informs the other. The most optimal strategy for the last three (of five!) bosses seems to just be based around running away until they hit you with a singular, simple sequence that you parry over and over again. You'll only ever hit them to try and speed things up, but hitting the bosses contributes such a marginal amount of stagger while also requiring that you press more than one button. You'd be better off not swinging. Either you focus almost solely on parries, or you find the one attack that completely breaks their AI and lets you loop it on itself for an easy kill. It's remarkably simple to get one of several infinites on Yang's phase one where you punch him in his dick or heavy-punch-swap-positions with him over and over for sixty straight seconds. The new problem we run into is that this kills the boss, which is what will guarantee that you get the bad ending.

Enough has been written about Sifu's stupid "revenge is bad" plot contrasted with how the player has no issue slaughtering goons in the run-up to the boss that I won't dig into it further than to say that it doesn't work. It's clunky, and it doesn't work. What I do feel gets ignored, however, is the rest of the story leading up to the point where you find out that revenge is bad. This is one of those "the lore is the story!" games that people who don't care for the Dark Souls narratives accuse the Dark Souls narratives of being. There are all sorts of little incidental trinkets and slips of paper that you can collect and read at your hideout conspiracy board, and it all broadly boils down to "the antagonists killed your father to steal some elemental talismans that they were otherwise forbidden from using". How this is meant to excuse them slitting a child's throat and then the game itself painting you as a bad person for killing them is left as an exercise to the player; more accurately, it's left to the 100% completionists who are planning to make "ENDING EXPLAINED" videos in the first week of release. A lot of people have mentioned feeling like the "revenge is bad" twist comes out of nowhere, and that's because there's very little given to the player across all of the cutscenes. It's there, it's set up, but it's not executed well.

But what's unforgivable is the fact that I invested into a focus build only to find out that the final boss is inexplicably immune to all focus attacks. My entire strategy was invalidated by the fact that the developers made him fucking invincible against a core strategy that has, up to this point, never once been hinted at to be something that wouldn't work. I was either going to have to try beating Yang using a completely hobbled skill set with nothing that would actually help in fighting him, or I was going to have to restart the entire game to set up a better build that I could actually bring into the final boss. Your skills get locked in after every level, which would mean starting over from scratch and ignoring one of the core mechanics of the game because I now had the meta-knowledge that it just doesn't work at the end for some reason. Fuck off. Imagine if Devil May Cry 3 took away your devil trigger for the final Vergil fight, or if the Elden Beast was immune to magic. Some YouTuber or streamer must have dropped the line "focus is a crutch" at some point because it's the only thing that the fucking parrots discussing this on Reddit (type "focus" "crutch" site:www.reddit.com/r/sifugame into Google and count the number of pages that show up) can come up with when someone makes a thread asking why they took the mechanic away just in time for the game to end. I know they didn't all come up with the exact same quote independently of each other, so I'm making an open call to my minions to go track down whoever said it. I'm putting up bounties and shit. We will find them.

The game is gorgeous, and I won't pretend like that isn't worth celebrating. There are a lot of really lovely touches with this watercolor-esque shader and bold lighting shifts. It doesn't always work — one fight takes place in the rain with only a spotlight illuminating a center area, and so you'll spend most of it in the dark trying to figure out where you are — but it hits far more often than it misses in the visual department. It's clear that, if nothing else, the team behind this has a genuine passion for the art side of things. If Sifu was an animated short film, it'd only really need a better script to be something special. It's regrettable that Sloclap made a video game, instead.

A friend of mine said he was upset that they never made an Absolver 2. I'll share his pain. I'd also like an Absolver 2. It'd probably stop them from making another Sifu.