Sifu is, by all accounts, a pretty hard game. Sloclap even patched the difficulty and sent an extra tips and tricks guide to journalists and influencers during the review period - an extremely rare occurrence. The version Johnny Gamer plays is already easier than the version reviewers started with, but it’s still a pretty hard game, and that means we’re all back talking about video game difficulty again.
Back at Christmas, I had a go at predicting the biggest instances of discourse for 2022. Video game difficulty was mentioned, but I expected - as all of us did - that Elden Ring would be the main culprit. We’re still a few weeks out from FromSoftware’s latest controller breaker, but Sifu has volunteered itself as tribute for us to practise our talking points. ‘Difficulty options are an accessibility issue’, ‘it’s the creator’s vision’, ‘someone else playing on easy doesn’t influence your enjoyment’, and ‘Celeste tho’ have been raised time and time again, and no doubt will be wheeled back out for Elden Ring later this month, and any other game where reviewers deign to mention difficulty as a factor that influences their score.
Those statements seem contradictory, but all of them can be applied together. It’s true that difficulty does come under the accessibility umbrella, both in the sense that it makes the game more accessible to all and in the sense that for some disabled players with limited motor skills or reaction speeds, difficulty options are as much a barrier to entry as bad subtitles. All games should be as accessible as possible, but ‘as possible’ is doing some heavy lifting there.
Sifu could certainly stand to be more accessible, but I’m speaking more generally here. Not all games are made for all people. It would be great if every game was accessible to every single player, and some are poorly designed in the accessibility stakes, but for the most part, it’s not always possible. Still, a lot of games could try a lot harder. Sifu could have hired accessibility consultants to help with this, but hiring consultants to help on its most important issues doesn’t feel like the game’s strong suit.
Then there’s the issue of the game’s vision. Sifu is a revenge tale about dedicating your life to a single, violent cause. It asks complete mastery from you, and for the true ending, asks for both mastery and restraint. It’s ‘supposed’ to be difficult. But if the story is weak and by the numbers, would it be even weaker if we went Oldboy on everybody’s ass all the time?
I mean, me playing it on easy mode doesn’t mean you have to, and it wouldn’t disrupt how you experienced the narrative, right? But it would have affected the developers, who would have had to come up with a way the difficulty works on a granular level rather than just ‘make it easier’. Do you give us more health? Give the boss less health? Make our hits deal more damage and theirs less? Are we faster? Are they slower? Not one of those solutions would help with the complex combos you need to learn each time.
Sifu could be easier, as the review period patch demonstrates, but only to a point. If you don’t want to learn each attack pattern and just want to punch punch kick through every battle, why are you playing? It’s essentially a boss rush title, if you don’t want to bother with the bosses, what are you doing? Sifu is… let’s be generous and call it a ‘homage’ to martial arts flicks. If you’re not interested in playing it and just want to see the story, just go and watch any of the movies it’s inspired by. They're considerably more authentic anyway.
Ahh, but ‘Celeste’. That was a hard game that made itself easier, so now no games get to be hard. Celeste was a puzzler, not a combat game. You still had to figure Celeste out, it was just more forgiving when you mistimed things. Sifu could be more forgiving, but it cannot just adopt the Celeste model. It also can’t just use Psychonauts 2’s ‘no death’ policy. It’s a boss rush game where a core mechanic and the narrative revolves around dedicating your life to revenge. If you could die 63 times and finish the game as a spry 21-year-old, there’s not much of a point to any of it.
The problem is with expectations. During the Sifu review period, our assigned reviewer tapped out and our guides writer, who eventually finished the game and got the true ending, took over as reviewer. That’s why we published a PSA on Sifu’s difficulty with the review embargo, although the rampant discourse machine Aed Sifu’s difficulty to the P anyway. We won’t be doing that for Elden Ring because everyone already knows what they’re getting into.
Marketing your game as difficult is, ironically, a difficult thing to do. It’s not conducive to sales to tell people they shouldn’t play, and it’s extremely easy to become cringy by bragging that only the most serious gamers need apply. Dying Light 2 attempted some weird viral marketing, pushing the 500 hours required to complete the game and the nonsensical comparison that the game has as many words as Anna Karenina, and was roundly mocked for it. Sifu didn’t seem to even try. There has been no attempt to show the difficulty or the level of mastery needed here - instead most of the adverts make it look like a slick kung fu simulator.
In principle, I have no issue with Sifu being a hard game. But as far as its creative vision goes, the game was patched mid-review cycle to tweak the difficulty downwards. Clearly that’s because all game “journalists” suck and need to git gud, but it took about a week of the game being out in the ‘wild’ (and not even full launch, but just around 150 different outlets) for the game’s ‘creative vision’ to include a patch for difficulty. Options still aren’t there, it’s just a little easier by default now.
It’s not that it’s hard, it’s that it’s doing nothing to convey this difficulty to players until they have bought the game and failed at it. Any journalists who have tried to communicate this difficulty - which again, was supposed to be even harder - have been hung out to dry by people who haven’t even played the game yet. Hard games are fine if you know they’re going to be hard. Sifu has never attempted to make itself look difficult, and with reviews dropping as the game launched, some people will have bought without it being made clear. The Celeste solution wouldn’t work, and ‘make it easier’ isn’t as simple as it sounds, but ‘creative vision’ only goes so far when the difficulty has already been changed before the game even launched. Mostly, Sifu owes it to its players to be honest. Unlike Elden Ring, it doesn’t feel like it has been.