What I Learned From Playing Sifu
If you can’t believe in yourself, then believe in the version of you that you will become.
For most of my life, I’ve been both an avid reader and an avid gamer. Something that’s always bothered me is the public’s general perception of literature as an enlightened, educated pursuit, while seeing gaming as little but a brain-rotting waste of time. In this post, I’d like to talk a little bit about a game I felt has had a net positive effect in my life.
Absolver is one of my favorite games ever made; a beautifully crafted, aesthetically stunning and captivatingly complex love letter to all things martial arts. In my opinion, it never really got the love it deserved, either from the general public or from its developers, though I can’t say I hold much against SloClap in that regard.
Absolver had been an ambitious concept, perhaps too much so: A pseudo MMO-RPG / Soulslike / Beat ’em up / Fighting game where every character’s moveset was fully customizable? It’s the sort of project most AAA studios would balk at, and for the relatively small team at SloClap, I have no doubt it was a hell of an undertaking to bring it to fruition.
This is why, when I first saw the Sifu reveal trailer back in 2020, I was both disappointed and excited: On the one hand, it saddened me to see SloClap stepping away from the world of Adal, which I’d fallen desperately in love with and wanted very badly to return to; on the other, taking the experience they’d acquired from developing the best elements of Absolver — the seamlessly flowing combat, the stunning visual flare, their knack for minimalist yet captivating storytelling — and transposing it into a more straight-forward, self-contained single player experience seemed like the right choice for a smaller studio.
In spite of my trepidation, I bought the game on launch day, hoping with all my might I would fall in love with it just as easily as I had with Absolver.
I didn’t.
From the first enemy encounter, I found myself struggling to really connect with Sifu. As I tried to familiarize myself with the dynamics of combat, I could see the game took a very binary approach to it: Either you were in — attacking, comboing, parrying your enemy’s counters and following up with devastating punishes — or you were out, with very little room to maneuver the spaces between.
This wasn’t entirely surprising to me. Absolver’s combat was similar in its duality between offensive and defensive play — keep your opponent on the back foot with a mixture of strings and frame traps, or correctly read their attacks to prevent them from doing the same to you — but Absolver also allowed you to fully customize your moveset, which made room for a more spacing, footsies-based combat; it allowed you to deploy weapons to give your opponents a different kind of challenge, and if you were down, it allowed you to use magic spells to turn the tide of battle.
Sifu did away with these options in favor of a straight-forward exchange of blows between you and your opponent. Either you hit them, or you get hit, and if you get hit enough times, game over, start again. No trickery, no alternate paths: Get good or die trying.
You could very well say that this is a good thing, that Sifu neglected superfluous variety in favor of engaging the player in a purer, more direct form of interaction. I definitely think there’s merit to that idea, but I personally found the concept daunting.
I consider myself to be “good” at videogames (I’ve played a whole bunch of competitive games at a decently high level, and have a laundry list of Steam achievements I believe most people would consider at least somewhat impressive) but I would never describe myself as skilled: My reflexes are slow, my hands are clumsy, I get easily overwhelmed in chaotic situations. Any hard games I’ve managed to beat, I’ve done so primarily through persistence and creativity, and I could immediately tell Sifu wasn’t interested in letting me cheese my way through enemies or mindlessly grind them down: If I wanted to progress, I was going to have to learn to play by its rules.
I made it as far as Shaun before giving it up.
It wasn’t a conscious decision, I just put the game down at some point after the first couple weeks, then didn’t pick it back up again. It wouldn’t be until a year later, after a shoulder injury took me out of martial arts for over a month and left me itching for the visceral, kinetic feeling of combat that I decided to give it another go.
As it would turn out, taking a break was the right choice: Without my preconceived notions of what Sifu might be, I was able to approach the game with a fresh mindset, which turned out to be all I needed. A week after I’d started playing, I’d successfully edged my way past Yang, and a couple days after that, unlocked the true ending.
I can honestly say I’m very glad I decided not to give up on the game: Learning how to approach it on its terms has been a uniquely illuminating experience, and today, I’d like to share with you a little bit of what I learned in doing so.
Use all the tools available to you
So, remember a few paragraphs ago, when I said that Sifu doesn’t give the player any tricks or gimmicks to relieve pressure from their raw combat ability?
Well, that was a storytelling literary device known as lying to you. In truth, while Sifu is definitively strict about how it allows you to engage with its combat, it still gives you plenty of tools you can use to get out of a bad spot, or turn the tides of battle in your favor: Maps are littered with blunt and sharp weapons, as well as throwables you can use to stun your opponents for a few free hits. You have special meter, your focus, which gives you access to moves that are great for extending combos (or starting one when you’re struggling to find a way in). Even the environment, which is often cluttered and uneven, can be used to your advantage by kicking enemies into walls or down stairs or off ledges.
Initially, I was reluctant to use these tactics, figuring it was better to face the enemies head on so I could practice with the core combat system. This proved to be sub-optimal, given if you don’t use these resources when they’re available, your enemies will be more than happy to take them from you: Any weapons you don’t pick up are likely to be end in the hands of your foes; groups of mooks will do the best to surround you, and when one of them gets a hit on you, you can expect the rest to follow up shortly after.
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This, to me, feels like the game sending you a message: There is no honor in this fight. Do whatever you can in order to win.
To my surprise, not only did broadening my strategy in this way allow me to progress faster, but it also helped me get better quicker, since I was able to face more demanding, more complex challenges more often in the later levels, which were better for honing my skills than repeatedly beating on the two losers in the starting area.
It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to get done
Another aspect that contributed to my early dissonance with Sifu might have been an initial expectation I had to be good at it from the start.
I know, I know. How arrogant of me. In retrospect, I don’t think I recognized back then that this is what was happening, but I definitely believe a part of me thought my skills in Absolver would transfer to at least some degree.
I came at the game with an ego, and in doing so, found myself becoming frustrated whenever I made a mistake, no matter how inconsequential: A bottle would fly in from off screen and hit me, or I would parry at the wrong time, incurring a massive structure penalty in the process, and my mind would become stuck, lingering on my perceived failure instead of focusing on the moment to moment combat.
This would lead to more mistakes, which would lead to more frustration, which would create a negative feedback loop that eventually saw me gaining forty years in a single room and stopping just short of putting my controller through a wall.
Picking the game up the second time around, I had very little expectations about my ability to perform. In that way, found myself not only not frustrated when I lost, but pleasantly surprised when I did well. I became comfortable with taking hits, seeing my health as a resource that could (and should) be spent on my way to a boss. I also shifted my focus away from having a “flawless defense”, opting instead for finding one or two moves from each opponent that I could reliably parry and using that to open them up, instead.
This new approach didn’t lead to me pitching all no-hitters, the way I initially wanted to, but it did allow me to complete levels a lot faster than I otherwise would have — and in the end, a level completed without taking any damage and a level completed with only a sliver of health both progress the campaign all the same.
I did my best to defend myself, lost a few years where I needed to, but otherwise tried to keep moving forward and approach each second of combat as if it existed in isolation. In doing so not only did I find myself making progress, but enjoying the journey a lot more along the way.
Do not let your personal preconceptions define you
I never expected to beat Sifu until I the moment I actually did.
Even during my second playthrough, when I suddenly found myself making speedy progress where I’d previously struggled, I was waiting to hit that wall, one I couldn’t get past. It’s just as I said earlier: I’m good, but I’m not a natural. I knew the game would eventually bring forth an enemy I was too slow, too dumb or too stiff to figure out, something that would stall my progress altogether, this time for good.
In spite of that, I kept moving forward. I’d learned to enjoy playing Sifu just for the sake of playing it, and as such, was happy to keep on chugging along until I simply couldn’t anymore. I tackled each level as they came, enjoying each new room and enemy for what they were.
I was honestly shocked when I opened the door to the temple and found Yang waiting for me on the other side. I thought I had a lot more game to go before ever I got to him.
That first encounter, he crushed me. This, I figured at the time, is where the journey ends for me: There’s no weapons in Yang’s room, no odd terrain for me to abuse — I couldn’t even use my focus to get a free hit on him. His attacks were fast, hard to read and brutally punishing. Someone with better eyes and faster hands could probably deal with this easily, but me? It’d take a miracle.
But still, I didn’t want to be done with Sifu yet, so I resolved to see just how far I could take Yang. I gave it another go.
I made my way to his chambers again and this time around, I found I could parry the second hit of this little flurry he did in response to one of my attacks. Then I realized I could parry all three. Before I knew it, I was reliably breaking his structure, and by the end of the day, I’d managed to take him down, only having to resurrect once in the process.
To say I was elated would be an understatement. Immediately after beating Yang, I started a new run aiming for the true ending, doing so with far more confidence than I’d had for my initial attempt; not ego this time, but a real, grounded understanding of what I was capable of based on my performance to that point. When I achieved that, it was like a switch flipped in my head.
Obviously, there is a deep sense of accomplishment that comes with completing a journey like Sifu, but for me, it went a step beyond that. For as long as I can remember, I had defined myself by my limitations: I was someone who could find success, though always through some manner of trickery or subterfuge, never through sheer ability. This pervaded more than just my gaming career — martial arts, programming, writing — in all aspects of my life, I’d always seen myself as a hard worker, but nothing more: I was happy to progress along and content with finding my ceiling.
Yet, Sifu had presented me with a challenge I perceived as insurmountable and slowly, patiently, guided me through it, not by taking me by the hand and making things easy for me, but by showing me gently, step by step, the path I needed to follow to get there, in turn not only showing me I was capable of beating it, but that generally, I could be the kind of person that beat insurmountable challenges if I just allowed myself to.
Is it silly that I had such a deep, personal revelation about myself because of a videogame? Maybe. I certainly wouldn’t resent you for thinking so. At the same time, this very much feels like the sort of revelation that could only have come to me through an interactive medium, such as a videogame. Regardless of how I feel, playing Sifu had, in my opinion, an undeniable positive effect in my life, and for that reason, it is a game I hold extremely dear to my heart.
