Sifu Review

ign.com:

From the very first punch, Sifu is utterly uncompromising in its design. Absolver developer Sloclap’s latest martial arts beat-em-up is bold, its combat exquisite, its animation top-notch, its music outstanding, and its story – while very simple – is poignant and elegantly told. It’s also unforgiving and unapologetic, with pockets of frustrating moments during which I was certainly not in my happy place. But by the end, Sifu offered me a nearly unparalleled sense of mastery and accomplishment, and I can’t imagine that I would’ve enjoyed it half as much if it pulled its punches.

Sifu begins, as so many revenge-fueled martial arts stories do, with a murder. Your father and martial arts master is killed right before your eyes in what is quite simply one of the best prologue chapters I’ve played in recent memory. It both serves as an excellent tutorial, and a teases at what the future holds for you as you have full access to the entire catalog of unlockable moves. Eight years later, you set off on a journey to kill each of the five people involved.

It’s a very simple premise but it’s executed wonderfully. You begin with very little information about your targets, but over the course of the campaign you start to piece together who they are and what they’re all about by collecting clues and evidence throughout each level. I found myself uniquely motivated to seek out each of them, not only because of the additional lore and context about the main character’s quest for vengeance that they provided, but also because finding one could potentially unlock doors in previous levels that would lead to entirely new sections. Plus, the way new information is added to a detective board that shows how everything is connected is a nice