Sifu

The ageing system is the review. Every death advances you a year, and every year makes you hit harder and break easier, until you are seventy and one clean hit ends the run. Most games use a death counter. This one makes the counter the difficulty curve, the story, and the reason to restart a level you already cleared.

The real progression is in your hands

Sifu does not get easier. You get better, and the game is unusually honest about the distinction. My first clear of the second level took me from age 22 to 46. My eighth took two deaths. Nothing about the level changed — I had learned when the big man commits, and where the bottle is, and which of the two doors puts a wall behind you.

That loop is the most satisfying skill acquisition I have had in a decade of playing this genre. It also means the game is unrecommendable to anyone who wants to see the ending on their own terms.

Final age

32

Total deaths

~340

Attempts on the club level alone

61

The combat is a real system

Parry, dodge, structure damage, environmental interaction — the vocabulary is small and every verb is load-bearing. Enemies are individually simple and collectively lethal, and the whole design assumes you are managing a room rather than a target. By the fourth level I was consciously positioning so that the second enemy could not reach me until I had finished the first, which is the sort of thinking usually reserved for tactics games.

Where it slips

The final boss is a wall in a game that had until then been a staircase, and the difficulty option added a year after launch does not fix it so much as remove the stakes entirely. There is no middle setting, which is a strange gap for a game so precisely tuned everywhere else.

The story is also thin — five revenge targets with a paragraph each, delivered through environmental detail you will not stop to read while five men are trying to kill you.

The verdict

Twenty-six hours, and around eighteen of those were spent replaying content I had already beaten because beating it better was the point. If that sentence appeals to you, this is a nine. If it does not, do not buy this.

Play it with a controller and do not touch the difficulty settings for at least ten hours.