Moreover, the lines of your face will deepen, and your hair-which at the outset is a neatly tied top knot of jet black-will flow and pale to an ashen white, like the wake of a spectre. Here, you start at age twenty, and with every decade your health bar will diminish and your physical strength will swell. Fitting how FromSoftware’s game, years on, continues to loom and lengthen. And it also allowed us to cheat our end, though the toll was wrought not on its protagonist but on the land, and in the lungs of those around him, as they succumbed to a respiratory rot. That game, too, featured a posture meter, which governed each opponent’s guard and could be filled to breaking. For Sifu, Sloclap has looked to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. The developer is Sloclap, a French studio (comprised of former Ubisoft Paris employees, who worked on Watch Dogs and the Ghost Recon series), whose debut was another martial arts action-R.P.G., Absolver. The wiping is done by besting powerful enemies in hand-to-hand (or, preferably, bottle-to-head) combat. Each death is worth one year die thrice with an unwiped slate, and the next time you resurrect you will have aged by three years. Death is hardly perma, but it isn’t without cost it accumulates, like interest or like dust, each time you expire. It’s also a restorative spin on the Roguelite, that heaviest of genres. It’s a clever metaphor, treating vengeance like a transaction, divesting it of the usual blood-riling passion and lending it the dispiriting air of debt management, as the empty years are inscribed into the lifeless ledger of our hero’s days. His mission really will add years to his life. Courtesy of an amulet, he is able to wake from death as though it were a power nap, and each time he does he gets older. Second, the child, whom we play as for the rest of the game, does grow up, but not before being slayed moments after the old man. A nice twist, saddling us with mechanical guilt while teaching us the controls. But things are not quite as they appear, and Sifu has surprises to spring.įirst, we begin playing not as the kid but as the principal assailant-a horse-like brute, with a long face and a dripping mop of dark hair-and the initial felling falls to us.
This spirit-leeching quest will add years to his life, and he will realise that revenge is not best as a coldly served dish but as something to grow out of and cast aside-though not before dispensing it with relish across a few furiously choreographed hours. Needless to say, the kid will grow up, hone his kung fu, and hunt down the killers. Immediately, we brace ourselves for the good company of a hundred clichés. We get a murdered master and a young pupil, cowering in a cupboard, watching the deed through a crack in the door. Sifu opens in a dojo, on a dark and stormy night.
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