In this way, it reminds me of Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 1 because of what it lacks. Though every fight is meticulously orchestrated - with balletically choreographed and animated Pak Mei, a furious Howie Lee soundtrack, and bucketloads of film references - the cumulative effect is strangely wearying, and not just because of the difficulty. In the end, Sifu doesn’t quite live up to its cinematic influences. Sloclap has described this repetitive structure of mastery in relation to the Chinese term kung fu, which translates as “a skill acquired through hard work and practice.” The game certainly makes you work hard for its payoffs.
The process is relentless, often demoralizing, and occasionally euphoric. So you abandon the new area and replay the old until you’ve essentially mastered it - completion without losing a single year. But when you first finish a stage, you’ll likely have scraped through in your 60s - only enough life for a cursory look around the following stage. The aging mechanic means you need to make it through each level youthfully in order to have a decent shot at completing the next. As you age (wrinkles and all) your enemies stay young, thus contributing neatly to the game’s surreal, at times metaphysical approach to aesthetics. If you’re not careful, you’ll be 70 by the time you finish the first level - one more death and it’s curtains for good. With each subsequent passing, your “death counter” rises, which means you age more quickly. You start the game at 20, and the first time you perish, you come back as 21. When you die, you resurrect, except you return a little older. Thankfully, as in most games (but very few films), death isn’t the end in Sifu. She, especially, will bring you back to Earth with a skull-cracking thump. That is, until you come up against bosses such as the artist Kuroki in the third level’s nightmarish art gallery. Eventually you get better, gaining confidence, and there comes a point where the combat starts to click. If you’re anything like me - poor at remembering the suite of light and heavy attacks, bobs and weaves - this manifests initially as frustration. So where does Sloclap’s game differ from these films? By imparting a feeling of agency through participating in the combat rather than simply watching it (which almost makes up for the lack of character arcs and emotions elsewhere). Why does the third stage, which takes place inside an art gallery, feature a monochromatic rain-soaked battle? Because it’s an iconic martial-arts image - a history Sifu desperately wants to be part of.
#Sifu video game movie
This is mostly fun and impressive, but occasionally you get the sense that each new scene is just an excuse for another movie reference. There’s verve in the construction of these environments, the way they shift in front of your eyes (with an almost dreamlike logic) from real-life settings to altogether more impressionistic, stylized spaces. The second is set in a neon nightclub that morphs into a burning training ground, the culminating boss wielding a flaming staff. These figures, who each embody one of the five Chinese elements, are simply waypoints in the larger game structure, and their elemental characteristics are reflected in the levels they bookend. Your motivations lack psychological depth, and the same is true for your enemies. There were five assassins, and so there are five levels, each culminating in a grueling boss fight. Fast forward eight years, and you assume control of that child, now a young adult intent on avenging their father. But hiding in the room is a 12-year-old child. You fight your way through a dojo, learning the ropes of the ultrafast, no-nonsense strain of Chinese kung fu known as Pak Mei until, eventually, you take out the elder. In the moody opening level, you play a deadly martial artist who, alongside a handful of other comic-book-ish characters, is intent on killing a wizened master. Similar to that film and so many of those Tarantino gleefully cited, revenge is the engine that drives this story forward.
Like Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 movie Kill Bill: Volume 1, Sifu attempts to distill an entire universe of martial-arts movies. Snow delicately falling on a deadly female assassin? Of course - Toshiya Fujita’s seminal 1973 picture Lady Snowblood.
#Sifu video game windows
In these windows of quiet, I find myself reeling through the Southeast Asian martial-arts-movie references the game has thrown at me. A tight apartment-block corridor with a cavalcade of bruising enemies? That’ll be Park-chan Wook’s Old Boy. Sifu also contains occasional moments of respite - a few seconds here and there for me to regain my composure. My hands are slow, the game is blisteringly fast, and I’m tasked with dodging, parrying, and pummeling a near-constant onslaught of enemies.
I’ve spent the last week getting my ass handed to me by Sifu, the new kung fu beat ’em up by Parisian studio Sloclap.
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