Sifu PS5 review – aging into it
The creators of Absolver return with another unique take on the fighting game genre, where every time you die you get older.
Video games offer a variety of punishments for failure, from being reincarnated a few feet from where you left off to losing every inch of progress you’ve gained up until that point. In Sifu though, when you lose you get older; you start the game as a lithe young martial artist but if you manage to beat the game it’ll likely be as a wrinkled old OAP. Although that is a pretty big if.
Sifu (a Chinese term for a skilled person or teacher) is the second game by French studio Sloclap, who released the similarly unique fighting game Absolver in 2017. For better and worse, Sifu has a lot in common with that game, including a sky high difficulty level that demands a level of dedication that many are going to be unwilling to provide.
Absolver was already compared to Dark Souls, when it first came out, and Sifu requires a similar approach in terms of carefully learning its systems and never letting your guard down for a moment. Sifu leans into this mentality by connecting it to the dedication needed to learn martial arts for real, something which almost feels like it would be easier than playing the game.
Oldboy has clearly been a major inspiration for Sifu, including a brazen recreation of the movie’s famous hallway scene, but the actual plot is just a generic revenge story about taking down five kung fu masters who killed your father. None of them are given any real characterisation though, and neither is your protagonist, so it’s very hard to care about any of them. Which is a shame given the obvious metaphor of wasting a whole life on revenge.
The visuals have the same drab, minimalist look as Absolver –
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