izigame.me

Sifu is a marriage of two of my favorite things in videogames: indie graphics painted with quick, wide brushstrokes and challenging, demanding gameplay. If you're not sure what the first part looks like, think The Long Dark or Life is Strange; for the latter, think Sekiro. Sifu is in fact so close to Sekiro that the game essentially lifts two of its fundamental mechanic from it, those being the parry system and the posture gauge. If you're not familiar, parrying attacks (tapping the block button at the last moment before impact) will fill your enemy's posture gauge. Once it's full, you will be able to start a finishing blow animation that will immediately kill your opponent, regardless of how much HP they have left. The major departure from Sekiro's gameplay are in the way Sifu adopts the perilous attacks system, and the ability to fight with bare hands or different weapons found in the levels. Unfortunately, the perilous attacks system is both the most complex part of Sifu and the most frustrating. By holding the block button and moving the analog stick in any direction, the player can avoid an attack by moving away from it rather than block or parry it. If the perilous attack is a low, you will need to avoid up, if it's a high you will have to avoid low, and so on. However, the player can still opt to parry or block perilous attacks, unlike in Sekiro, where they will go through your defenses and must be avoided. The tradeoff is that if the player fails to parry at the right time or simply blocks the perilous attack, they will take a large amount of damage--whether HP or posture.
The idea behind the avoid mechanic seems to be twofold: to introduce further depth to the gameplay, and to allow the player to recover some of their posture during long fights, since avoiding an attack (perilous or not) will remove some of the damage from your gauge. Where all of this falls apart is that these attacks are very often hard to see. In Sekiro, a perilous attacks has both a visual and a sound cue; in Sifu, there is only a visual queue (except for grabs, which must also be avoided and have a short sound cue). The limb the enemy is attacking with will turn red just before the attack starts, prompting the player to avoid it. However, about half of these visual cues will be interrupted by line of sight. Sifu is a kung-fu game after all, and while weapons are part of the martial art, they are not always necessary. Because your enemy will always be close to you, the player character's model will almost always block out part of or all of the visual cue; if you constantly adjust your camera you might have time to notice it, but by then it will be too late to react. This is extremely frustrating, since the game is otherwise almost always the kind of 'tough but fair' experience souls players like me enjoy. I wonder if my colorblindness is aggravating this--a lot of the areas in Sifu are reddish or brown, and the orange color of the perilous attacks can get lost on that. But whether you're colorblind or not, you can't see through your character model, and maybe the devs should have considered having that as an optional toggle, especially since that's already how walls work in this game. That's right, the camera is (mostly) not an enemy in this soulslike: get too close to a wall, and it will simply go transparent, allowing you to keep your focus on the battle instead of on the right analog stick. I don't quite understand why they didn't think to apply this same logic to the player character's model.
Other than this unfortunately major issue, Sifu is a treat. The third boss in the game in particular has become one of my favorites of all time, a perfect mix of balance and challenge the likes of which I hadn't seen since Isshin. I would say overall the game is even harder than Sekiro (or maybe I've just played it less) while offering less content. At the same time, I want to commend it for the design approach that brought to this result: the 5 levels of this game are deep rather than long, and you can play them over and over without ever reaching mastery, and that's without even mentioning the bosses.