Yes, through dogged practice, you can eventually recognise attack patterns and attune your muscle memory to parry and counter (though both are susceptible to mashing inputs rather than precise timings) in order to break your opponents’ structure, which like Sekiro’s posture gauge is more important than whittling down their health. At least regular bouts against minibosses or certain other enemies can reduce that death counter, but when you’re banging your head against an already impenetrable boss, it’s made worse when each successive failure literally shaves more years off your life until a decade flies by in one fell swoop. But the bosses toss aside the rules, so you’re not really playing a fighting game against a fair opponent but one whose relentless attack patterns cut through any combo strings you’ve worked so hard to unlock (a sore point when you have to spend so much on the same move multiple times before you’ve learned them permanently). It’s soon apparent that you’ll need to return to earlier levels, mastering them until you can clear them with as few deaths as possible. You’ll find statues that let you unlock perks and upgrades, and even reset your death counter, but there’s no getting back the lost years (some perks and skills are also gated once you’re past a certain age). If you’re already an old-timer before you’ve reached Sifu’s third level, then, your chances of reaching the end are nigh-on impossible. By the time you’re in your seventies, the next death is permanent. On the upside, as each decade passes and you’re visibly greyer, your attacks become slightly stronger, but your max health is also reduced. If you fall again, the counter will go up one, so you age two years, then by three, and four, and so on. The pendant’s power allows you to get back up again after defeat, but at the cost of you ageing by a year. By that, I mean the protagonist’s lifetime. You also have just one life to get through it all. Whether you’re facing adept martial artists or low-level thugs, everyone is capable of hitting you hard, and they can be deadly in groups. Instead, Parisian studio Sloclap knuckles down on creating a brutal kung fu lesson, based on the ruthlessly efficient Pak Mei style, accentuated by its sound design, which while not simulating the realistic sound of a metal pipe against a cracked skull, nonetheless leaves a wincing impact. This isn’t a typical beat-’em-up where you’re living the power fantasy of effortlessly taking down goons, though. A mystical pendant in your possession, however, means you survive the massacre before spending the next eight years training your skills in order to exact revenge on all five. You play a martial arts student who witnesses their master’s brutal murder at the hands of a former student and four of his cronies. Incidentally, its revenge plot is more Kill Bill – a classic example of Hollywood Orientalism. Sifu (literally ‘teacher, or ‘master’) takes place in an interpretation of China that magpies from the iconography of cultures and cinema from across the Asian continent that has reached to western audiences, with an eye on the kineticism of Hong Kong kung fu flicks.
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