Sifu – Zero Punctuation

But anyway, I’d been getting requests for Sifu and finally had the chance to play through it last week, and I’d have to say it is an interesting game. You play a young martial artist who as a child watched their mentor get killed and who then trains for years before going flip-out spanky-wa – oh hang on that’s not very interesting at all. Okay, so it’s a game where you go through a sequence of levels based on urban settings where every single person you meet from junkies to janitors to businessmen to substitute maths teachers is trained to the exact same standard in one highly specific martial art, except for the fat ones who all learned grappling techniques from handling their enormous sandwiches – oh wait that’s not very interesting either, that’s just the bog standard retro arcade brawler template. It even ends each level with a colourful boss and litters the environment with disposable melee weapons because apparently the only things people throw away in this world are beer bottles, broom handles and fileting knives. I guess it’s pretty interesting that it’s being done in 3D over the shoulder style, although it does on one or two occasions switch to a 2D side on camera when it starts to fret that the reference might be going over peoples’ heads.

The first interesting bit is the gameplay mechanic wherein every time your character dies from getting kung-fued too much – which will happen frequently because the basic combat also borrows from the retro arcade gaming tradition of being designed to remove coins from the pockets of unsupervised schoolchildren with all the fervor of the CIA removing democracy from an easily bullied oil-rich South American country – then they immediately come back to life, but age an entire year. So you start out as a fresh faced Disney prince in his school jogging trousers and death by death watch his beard grow and his muscles fill out until by the end he’s about forty-six and looks like an overgrown ornamental rock garden. It’s an interesting storytelling concept, really drives home the main character’s obsession if he’s willing to waste an entire puberty bringing down one troublesome boss fight, but in practical terms it’s not much more than a classic lives system with a hard limit. There’s a couple of associated gimmicks, as you age your health goes down but your damage goes up, but otherwise you might as well put it out of your mind.

I mean, on my first attempt I was stressing out restarting the first level over and over again when I was dying too many times because much the same reason I gave up binge drinking, I didn’t want to waste my twenties. But eventually I learned to relax and go with the flow. The flow of being killed, because it’s not a long game and forty-fifty odd lives is more than enough, frankly, and at points you can even spend XP on rolling your age back a few years if it bothers you that much, although that kinda defeats the message as I interpreted it. “Ooh, don’t waste your precious years on revenge because you’ll never get them back. Now, would you like to spend some Sifu fun bucks on getting a bunch of your years back?” But it is a game where you are expected to die a certain amount. Combat’s bloody hard to get to grips with. It starts with your standard light attack heavy attack dodge block parry arrangement then puts the whole thing in fast forward and makes everyone get right up in each other’s elasticated waistbands. And the trouble with the over the shoulder perspective is that your attacks all have about half as much range as you think they do.

Buy the snap kick as soon as you can because that’s about the best way to close distance and otherwise your little T-Rex arms will spend a lot of time whirling through empty air ruffling everyone’s ties and pocket squares. Also, you’re supposed to press up or down while holding block to weave around certain low and high attacks, but I’d just hold block and randomly wiggle the stick about like an unruly clitoris and that’d have maybe a sixty percent success rate. I guess I like the combat because it does feel satisfying to take apart a roomful of thugs like they’re a mess of tangled Christmas lights, and in the end that is the whole point, to let us feel like the dude in the martial arts movie going full flip-out spanky wanky on a foolful of rooms. I mean a roomful of fools. Sorry, can we take a moment to appreciate that I only invented the phrase “flip-out spanky wanky” two minutes ago and yet its meaning was already perfectly clear? Demonstrates real articulacy, I think. If I have a complaint for the combat system I’d say some kind of lock on would be nice so when surrounded my dude doesn’t just randomly pick who he’s going to start windmilling at based on who’s got the least appealing facial hair or something.

I suppose when you boil it down Sifu isn’t much more than a level-based brawler with a couple of gimmicks and a focus on achieving mastery through repetition, the story’s not a huge draw because most of the voice performance is going for “serious unflappable stoic” but comes across more like “trying to escape a dull conversation on the bus.” But it also has a visual stylishness that I think elevates it a bit. The environments have an appealing look and attention to detail that reminds me of Hitman, at least until you’ve turned them into impromptu bowling alleys with thugs for pins and box ottomans for balls. There was one last disappointment in store, and that’s that there was a bad ending and a good ending where to get the good ending you have to do the boss fights in an extra hard way that goes against what the game’s been teaching you the whole time. You’re supposed to duff them up until the icon comes up that says “press X to split me open like a naughty coin purse” and then not do that. Well geez, pardon me for being prompt. Of course you get the bad ending for killing bosses and the good ending for sparing them because revenge is not the answer blah de blah. Change the fucking record. Why do we always get so selectively judgey about killing people? As I said to the arresting officer.