There's More To Sifu's Difficulty Discourse Than Just How Hard It Is

thegamer.com:

Sifu is, by all accounts, a pretty hard game. Sloclap even patched the difficulty and sent an extra tips and tricks guide to journalists and influencers during the review period - an extremely rare occurrence. The version Johnny Gamer plays is already easier than the version reviewers started with, but it’s still a pretty hard game, and that means we’re all back talking about video game difficulty again.

Back at Christmas, I had a go at predicting the biggest instances of discourse for 2022. Video game difficulty was mentioned, but I expected - as all of us did - that Elden Ring would be the main culprit. We’re still a few weeks out from FromSoftware’s latest controller breaker, but Sifu has volunteered itself as tribute for us to practise our talking points. ‘Difficulty options are an accessibility issue’, ‘it’s the creator’s vision’, ‘someone else playing on easy doesn’t influence your enjoyment’, and ‘Celeste tho’ have been raised time and time again, and no doubt will be wheeled back out for Elden Ring later this month, and any other game where reviewers deign to mention difficulty as a factor that influences their score.

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Those statements seem contradictory, but all of them can be applied together. It’s true that difficulty does come under the accessibility umbrella, both in the sense that it makes the game more accessible to all and in the sense that for some disabled players with limited motor skills or reaction speeds, difficulty options are as much a barrier to entry as bad subtitles. All games should be as accessible as possible, but ‘as possible’ is doing some heavy lifting there.

Sifu could certainly stand to be more accessible, but I’m