Backlog Game 001: Sifu

Main image source: www.jvfrance.com

I wrote in my introductory post that there were a few “embers” keeping my interest in gaming alive, even as it was, for all intents and purposes, very much in the rear-view mirror of my life; one of the last embers to fall on the pyre before my love of gaming fully caught fire again was “Sifu”.

Maybe because I’d clicked on a few gaming-related news stories here and there, the Facebook ad algorithm kept serving me up Sifu posts about or month or so before the game’s release in early 2022. I thought to myself “huh, that does look pretty cool, I’ll keep that in mind”.

Fast forward to mid-2024; I’d bought myself a used PS4, and one of the first games I sought out was Sifu.

In hindsight, it’s funny that that would be the game I’d want to launch myself back into gaming with. After all, most people tackle a backlog back to front, or in my case oldest release to newest release.

Not so, with Sifu, so strong was the “hook” to the game, which is its promise to turn you into a virtual kung-fu master, capable of mimicing the moves of the greats.

But first…

The difficulty.

Greatness isn’t given, it’s earned, and holy shit is this game hard to start with.

I suppose that’s not a bad thing: on one hand, forget dipping back into gaming gently, on the other hand, I figured if I could tackle this, everything after this game would be pure (easy) fun and enjoyment.

I read a lot of differing views about Sifu’s difficulty during my climb up the game’s learning curve, and many of those perspectives converged on the fact that Sloclap was trying to mimic the progression of a real-life martial artist (or anyone trying to master anything, really): struggle, refinement, and transcendence, after which point every move seems effortless and one can almost telepathically detect an opponent’s next moves.

My view is similar but more game-centric, in the sense that Sifu’s combat system has to be incredibly deep to allow the things it does, and I don’t see how that depth could have been reduced to a couple of button presses every time you meet an enemy.

In other words, when played well, the game looks awesome because you can roll over an obstacle, throw a bottle at your opponent, turn around and take out another bad guy behind you with a baseball bat you flipped up with your foot, then shoulder-throw your first opponent before moving onto the next group of opponents.

When done properly, it’s poetry in motion, and I wouldn’t say that the game is difficult because the developers intentionally made it so (for instance by programming cheap AI), but rather just because the vision they had for the game requires practice on the part of players.

To do all of the stuff I described (and much more!) requires not only visualizing the chain of motions ahead of time, but also then turning those motions into button inputs; both those series of events can only come with practice.

With regards to the first aspect of playing Sifu well, I’m no cage-fighting badass, but I have had years of martial arts training, and what I found really well done was just how much Sifu’s approach to combat mirrors how one might approach a situation where they had to fight for their life against a group (though keep in mind that even an expert would probably die in such a real-life scenario): put space between yourself and your enemies, attack aggressively, move around your environment and fight back with whatever you can.

All that is to say that my mind knew what I had to do in front of a group of attackers, but getting my fingers to get those moves out took a lot of practice.

Like many Sifu players, I faced the true test of whether or not I would push through the game in the second - yes, second - level, the infamous “Club”.

Wave after wave of enemies.

Sub-boss after sub-boss.

Capped off with two versions of the imposing main boss, Sean the Fighter.

I must have played this level for a dozen hours, trying my best to keep my age as low as possible, and when I finally did beat The Club at around 30 years old, I truly felt like I had accomplished something.

More importantly, I felt I was close to (if not quite at) that transcendence stage, and I was confident that even though I still had 60% of the game’s levels to go, I’d have comparatively less trouble managing them (except for Kuroki the Artist, holy shit…).

Once I passed that point, it became very hard to put the game down or move onto anything else, because I could now walk into a room, plan out my attacks, and recreate a kung-fu film in every level.

It felt FUCKING AWESOME.

Once I’d cleared both the “bad” and the “Wude” endings, I was ready for the Arenas add-ons, and though I still don’t care for every single one of them, the good is insanely good, a grouping of lovingly-made hommages to cinematic kung-fu, put together by a team that is clearly passionate about the source material (and this is all given away for free, merci beaucoup Sloclap!).

For me, Sifu is still incomplete from an achievements point of view, but I have no interest in grinding out more time with the game to win more trophies just for the sake of it (I’ll write more on this topic in a later post). Nevertheless, I can absolutely see myself going back to the game from time to time simply to replay some of the levels that I do like a lot, or just keep my skills sharp, maybe for a sequel some time down the line?…

Overall, Sifu was a phenomenal leap back into gaming for me, and even though there is currently a huge gap in my gaming knowledge - with the inherent lack of historical context that implies - I’m still comfortable saying that future gamers might view this as one of the best games ever, or at least one of the most influential from a gameplay perspective.

“Whao there David, what are you on to say something like that?”, you ask.

No, the game is neither epic in scope nor in the lineage of a legendary franchise, but the fighting mechanic alone, as hard as it is to grasp fully, has simultaneously ruined every other beat-em-up in my backlog, and set the bar for future fighting games.

Though I have a feeling that Ninja Gaiden Sigma (yep, haven’t played that one) will be badass, will it be as badass as Sifu?

Will any other similar game in the pipeline be as good as Sifu, save perhaps for a sequel directly from Sloclap, or something like a licensed “John Wick” game built by the Sloclap team?

I don’t think so.

I understand how this can come across as gatekeeping, as if somehow I’m saying that all subsequent action games should be brutally hard and weed out players in level 2. That’s not my intention, and if a large publisher has to shrink their combat system down to three buttons to sell units, then so be it.

However, Sloclap is an indie developer that wasn’t targeting the mass market, and I’m glad they could be so hardcore about the gameplay.

Let’s give a “slow clap” to them for their work on Sifu, and if most of the games I play on my backlog journey are even half as engaging as this, I’m in for a wild, wild ride.