I'm going to start this one like so..
This game is friggin hard!
Seriously, do not be fooled by the first stage. Yes, it's difficult, but the jump in difficulty between this and stage 2 (The Club) slides up to insane levels.
Sifu is an action/rougelite/super hard game by sloclap in which you play as a young lad out to avenge his Fathers death at the hand of a group led by... The Leader. You'll fight, a lot, through various stages and the key to success is literally perfect timing with dodge/parry and the avoid system. Avoid is used by holding the L1/Lb and flicking the RS just before an enemy makes contact. Sounds easy but the window for this and parrying is really small and you will be hit.. and die... a lot. I've heard som copare the combat to the Arkham series and I will tell you now, that is a HARD NO. This feels nothing like the arkham games. I feel it has more in line with sloclaps previous game absolver then anything.
Death is handled in that when you start the game, your age is 20. Whenever you die, a death counter appears and your age increases by how large the death counter is. after your first death, you'll age to 21, and so on. You can reset your counter by beating special enemies in a level as well as bosses. An interesting system that's limited by how you unlock skills. You can use XP earned to gain skill in a run. But, in order to unlock it permanently, you have to keep spending XP, a lot of XP, to get the permanent unlock. For example, a skill costs 500 XP to gain. Once bought, you them have to spend another 2500 XP on that same skill to unlock it. IMO, this sucks.
I've been playing this since launch and when everything clicks and you get into a combat flow, it's great. The graphics have an old water color look to them that i don't really find that impressive but considering the story being told, it fits. Audio is ok i suppose. You'll get a lot of ambient sounds coming through the dual sense controller, like flies buzzing around a pile of garbage or walking over broken glass, and the dialogue is ok too.
I don't know what it is with Sony and some of their exclusives lately being so difficult. Demons Souls, Returnal and now Sifu. If I'm trying to entice gamers to my platform with a nice, new game, I'd at least put in a difficulty option to make this more accessible to everyone and not limit it to a small select group of gamers.
Basically, if you're a fan of souls games, rouge, rougelites, or just brutal, unforgivingly difficult games, then this is for you. I'd recommend to anyone else interested to wait until sloclap implement a difficulty option before giving it a go.