Sifu is a fascinating, eccentric action game that wants you to think about time and mastery. It's no small order, but if anyone can pull it off it's Sloclap, the studio best known for Absolver. You start as a kung-fu student hellbent on revenge after their father was murdered by five assassins and his Pak Mei Kung Fu school destroyed. You know the drill, but you don't show up to Sifu for the plot. What makes Sifu interesting is the fact that when you die (and you will die) you have the opportunity, thanks to a mystical pendant, to come back to life, but it comes with a cost. Every time you come back, you age, and with each death you age a little more. You might, then, begin a stage as a robust, powerful 20-something, but end it as a spritely 70-something. Meanwhile, each death gives you the opportunity to spend XP to acquire new skills, improving and adapting to the situation that just killed you. That means that over the course of a single playthrough you might develop from a hotheaded student through to salt-and-pepper mentor figure to wizened old legend. And if you get too old and die, that'll be game over. A 'detective board' that collects the information you've gathered, such as shortcuts through stages and hidden weapons, will take some of the sting out of death, but you'll still need to regain all the strength and skill that you've lost. This is the core gameplay loop of Sifu, an effective distillation of what any good videogame does - act, die, repeat, improve, progress.
