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.

[guy who hasn’t played any adventure games besides Disco Elysium] Hmm...getting a lot of "Disco Elysium" vibes from this...

I think Stasis: Bone Totem is something of a victim of its own fan base. While I try not to let other peoples’ opinions of games influence my own, it’s impossible to fully deny that something getting wall-to-wall praise is going to set my expectations high. I’ve scarcely heard a single bad word said about any aspect of this besides the AI art that it launched with, and that all got patched out. This has a steep enough rating curve to suggest that it’s phenomenal. And while Stasis: Bone Totem is definitely good, I think that’s about all that it manages to be. This isn’t the earth-shaker that was promised. But hell, what is? We can’t all be juggernauts. There’s hardly anything wrong with only being good.

It’s not difficult to see why people love this game as much as they do. It has an interesting world, interesting characters, wonderful audio design, and a truly impressive pre-rendered graphical style on the interactables that hearkens back to old CD-ROM adventure games. I would die for Moses, but he wouldn’t want that for me. The relationship that he develops with Faran is far and away the juiciest piece of meat that the game asks you to sink your teeth into. Calaban is a distant second, though he’s still enjoyable; the irony is that the married couple seem to have the least chemistry out of anyone aboard this abandoned ship. I definitely think that the game tries to lean a bit too hard into crafting arc phrases that get repeated over and over and over again — every character independently thinks to themselves that "all you need to do is blink" for something to change — but there's a charm to it. Again, it's carried hard by Moses. He's a simple bear, but he's got a good soul. There's something deeply upsetting about a childish AI struggling to deal with feelings of loss and grief that it wasn't built to understand that could (and probably should have) carried this entire game by itself. I mostly just wanted everyone else to stop talking because they were taking up valuable screen time that otherwise would have gone to Moses and Faran, who remain two of the greatest homies to ever hang out on the bottom of the ocean floor.

While I liked the dialog, the narration prose gets on my nerves. Olga Moskvina is credited as the sole writer for the environmental descriptions — knowing that she worked on Disco Elysium before Stasis: Bone Totem is nothing short of shocking, seeing how steeply the writing quality has declined from that game to this one. A friend of mine spent several evenings trying to cope with the fact that Michael Kirkbride wrote Immortals of Aveum, and all of the laughter I directed at him has now rocketed back to me at double the velocity. How do you fall off this hard? This fiercely? I was convinced that it was all being written by someone who had never written before, not by a co-writer of one of my favorite pieces of media ever released.

Ten-dollar words are everywhere in every little green blob, covering them like smallpox blisters. So much of the vocabulary here feels almost as though it was destroyed in the editing stage by someone doing right-click thesaurus swaps on every other word. I feel like I'm reading something that was put together solely to flex the author's new English-to-Lovecraft translation program. Even the most boring of objects are "eldritch", or "Stygian", or "noctilucent", or any other archaic-ass word that doesn't quite mean what the writer seems to think they do. An emptied suitcase isn't an empty suitcase, it's "disemboweled". A film on top of water isn't an oily film, but an "odorous waxy complexion". Even when you are looking at something that's meant to be horrifying, the prose mostly just makes me roll my eyes; a cesspit of blood and bodies is described as a "thickening grume-river of congealed blood and matted offal [which] incites bubbles that vomit up distressing fetors of deep decay". Perhaps the worst of the lot is the simple statement that a bench "broadcasts discomfort". Ugh.

A big part of what I liked about Disco Elysium was the fact that it used some remarkably simple prose to convey some very heavy topics. It was as accessible as it was powerful. Similarly, a big part of what I liked about The Devil's Imago was that it knew when to invoke the sublime and when to dial it back; that which was beautiful was described as though it was beautiful, and the mundane was described as mundane. Disco Elysium was broadly simple, and The Devil's Imago was broadly complex, but neither of those works pigeon-holed themselves into being all of one or all of the other. There's nothing wrong with being straightforward as much as there's nothing wrong with being oblique, but when you're garrulously invoking expressions and articulations absent the favorable junction of circumstances by which your inscriptions may abide — that is to say, when you're dropping endless strings of big, fancy words without giving the rest of your writing a chance to breathe — it makes your work look amateurish.

I have to conclude that this is, ultimately, a directorial problem. I know that Olga Moskvina is capable of far better than what's here; I've read her poetry, and I've read her contributions to Disco Elysium. She's capable of some stunningly beautiful prose, and none of her other work falls into the overly-verbose trappings of the environmental descriptions in Stasis: Bone Totem. She writes with rhythm everywhere but here. The original Stasis had a similar problem — provided you consider any of what I've complained about here to be "a problem" — which only furthers my belief that she was encouraged to mangle her writing to make it fit into this universe. It's as if she was told to make it more gross every time she submitted a draft. This is like how potato chips were invented. Fifth tit revision in a row.

It's here that I realize that I've dedicated about six hundred words purely to Olga Moskvina's incidental descriptions and that there are other aspects of the game worth discussing. A decent pivot would be to say that this devolves into being tonally all over the place by the end of the game. Moses and Faran both die at the same time, with Faran succumbing to the loss of his life support, and Moses tearing himself in half to get the rescue suit to his humans. We're treated to a cutscene where Mac cries the Tear of the Goofy Goober over the sound of tinkling piano keys. He then rips the medkit off of the support suit that Moses died to retrieve and triumphantly states "Hmph! Medical kit retrieved!" not even five seconds later. He's back to sighing and rolling his eyes at the Russian ghost in his brain while Charlie lays dying of ancient parasites not ten feet away, so it's good to know that there's nothing so serious as to stop Mac from looking to camera like Office Jim whenever he discovers a new world-shattering revelation. Stone Age island-dwelling molepeople sank to the bottom of the ocean where they founded Latin American Atlantis and are currently preparing to re-invade the surface world, and Mac mostly just seems annoyed by the whole affair. Hell, Mac, I feel you. I can't pretend like this isn't stupid either.

Ultimately, Stasis: Bone Totem is good. I just can't shake the feeling that something is missing. Looking at all of the pieces individually, I feel like this should all work together; you assemble them into a singular work, and it feels like it's less than the sum of of its parts. Maybe that's wrong. It might be that the parts themselves failed to live up to their own potential. In the places where this had every opportunity to be a slam dunk, it instead manages only to drop in a lay-up, and the two points you get from the latter aren't worth the same two points you get from the former. Nobody's ever made a highlight reel worth watching comprised of just finger rolls.

I got the transcendence chip so that my immortal soul can go to the Nexus, sponsored by Walmart.