Sifu’s a kung-fu beat ‘em up that has a stance based combat system similar to Sekiro, where learning to dodge and parry attacks is essential to overcoming difficult enemies and bosses. And just the same, it’s very unforgiving until enough time is spent getting used to its levels and mechanics.

In addition there’s a roguelike element to it where each death will make your character older. Giving you greater damage but less health until you get too old to fight and have to start over, losing the progress of the level and any skills up to that point that haven’t been unlocked permanently. Initially I wasn’t sure I would like this as losing significant playtime is the one thing that can be a turn off for roguelike games, but in practice it’s much more tolerable.

Aging carries over to the next level, and starting over will only set you back to the start of that level with the same age. And since the game has shortcuts, you can retry and just skip through much of the level if you’ve already reached that point before.

But because the combat gets more complicated as you progress, it’s encouraged to go back through prior levels and try to pass them without dying to maintain a young age (for more lives) up to the final level. And it’s worth it as I kept replaying and gradually improved more and more until I was flying through them with minimal deaths all the way to the end.

I really liked the art style too. It’s like a mix of cell shaded characters and environments with realistic looking lighting, and some of the locations are very cool like the third level.

I did have some issues though. While the combat’s very enjoyable, I’m not sure it was as tightly designed as I would’ve liked. Parries and dodges can feel inconsistent with different enemy types, and it can be a bit too hard to telegraph some attacks especially with bosses.

There’s also a story here, but it’s not really fleshed out enough to take notice. Your father was killed and you take revenge by going after the ones responsible. That’s about it really, you get some information about the characters through a detective board but they don’t have much substance to them beyond the premise. The focus is mainly on their designs and fights though so I didn’t mind.

Had a ton of fun with this. When looking at its five levels altogether it’s actually a pretty short game, but the amount of time you’ll spend trying to master each one adds a lot of replayability to it.