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Sifu is an intense kung fu brawler that demands a lot of practice and patience to master. Each death you suffer will leave its mark on your body, progressively aging until you are too old to fight. On your path to revenge the only way forward is to master the art of kicking ass.

Combat

Every character, including yours, has both a traditional health bar, as well as a structure bar (equivalent to posture in Sekiro). You can defeat any enemy by either depleting their health with plain attacks or damaging their structure. Performing blocks at precisely the right time or moves that throw enemies off balance, will increase the structure bar until it's filled up. This will open someone up for a takedown move that instantly kills them, regardless of remaining health.
Most of the time you will be surrounded by crowds of foes fighting you at once, which means you often can't focus on killing a single enemy at a time. Instead, you will have to react to whoever is the most immediate threat and get them away from you just long enough to deal with the next one. Good situational awareness over your opponents and thinking on your feet are a crucial skills to pick up.
In addition to combos that deal plain damage, some moves have specific utility purposes. Palm strikes can push an enemy away from you to create some space. Leg sweeps knock them onto the ground and disarm them. With throws you can knock someone into a nearby wall for additional damage, or into a crowd to stagger many foes at once. Brute force alone usually isn't enough to do well, but utilizing the environment and choosing the right moves will help tremendously.
Occasionally you will get the chance to pick up weapons like wooden bats or staffs, letting you deal more damage and extending your reach. They are very potent against weaker enemies, who will go down in far fewer strikes. Weapons have limited durability and won't last forever, so you can't rely on them at all times, but in certain troublesome encounters the extra edge can make or break a fight. Throwing your weapon can also stun and massively hurt whoever is unlucky enough to be in the way.
Combining all the various aspects of combat and using them effectively isn't going to come naturally right away. You may start out just circling around groups, trying to play it safe while fishing for lucky hits with some stray punches. The game encourages you to replay stages a LOT, becoming gradually bolder and more secure with your grasp on the mechanics until they become firmly embedded as instinct. This is the point where you will begin making many split-second decisions resulting in impressive looking strings of moves, that knock enemies all over the place and leave nobody in the room with any chance to catch their breath.

Difficulty

Upon death, the game allows you to resurrect right on the spot and carry on fighting immediately. This comes at the cost of your character's age increasing each time you continue. Growing too old means you lose for good and have to restart the level. After beating a level, your current age is saved as a starting point for the next one, so when you die of old age, you only lose progress of the current stage. You can go back to previous ones and try to beat them with fewer deaths, to give you more room for mistakes in the late game, which is very much encouraged.
After struggling to finish the early levels without wasting too many years, it might seem like a monumental task to ever be beating the whole game, let alone replaying it for the true ending. However, you'll find that repeated runs of a level will go by MUCH faster and smoother as your experience grows. Lost health is easily regained with takedowns, and improving at reading and responding to enemies will allow you to do them faster and more reliably.
Consistently playing very badly will eventually force you to start over and try to do better. With overall decently skillful play however, the occasional misstep will not become a serious obstacle. The game is much more forgiving than it makes itself seem, it asks not for perfection, but you do have to grow alongside the game's increasingly demanding challenges.
Bosses are less forgiving, and likely where you will burn most of your deaths on. They tend to react better to some of your "dirty" moves and generally aren't as easily overwhelmed as regular enemies. The emphasis lies more on learning the precise patterns on when to block and evade them. It's a very different pace from the rest of the game and feels a lot more rigid in how you overcome them. Luckily, being able to resurrect means you are less likely to be stuck with retrying a boss forever, unless you want to go for minimum deaths.

Technical Issues

Motion Blur and Temporal Antialiasing cannot be disabled easily in-game, it is necessary to edit "Engine.ini" in "%localappdata%\Sifu\Saved\Config\WindowsClient" and add these lines at the end:

r.MotionBlurQuality=0
r.PostProcessAAQuality=0
I would also recommend installing the game on an SSD if possible. The game loads chunks of the level during gameplay when you pass certain load triggers. This causes a noticeable stutter, which is made worse by being installed on a hard drive. Installing it on an SSD doesn't make it fully go away, but it makes it much more bearable. I'm not sure why proper asynchronous loading wasn't implemented, since consistent stutters in the same areas are quite annoying when replaying levels over and over again. Thankfully most of the time they don't interfere with combat. The game runs fine and without hitches during regular gameplay.

Final Judgement

This is easily my favorite game that I discovered this year. It captures the vibe of a gritty, chaotic martial arts movie, not only with its combat, but also with the attention to detail. Little unpredictable moments like enemies accidentally hitting each other in a crowded hallway or furniture breaking apart into improvised weapons go a long way to make fights feel immersive. The animations for EVERYTHING are incredibly smooth and incorporate the nearby environment very seamlessly, such as unique takedown animations for slamming someone's face into a kitchen table, should you find yourself next to one.
Everything about this game is executed masterfully and it all comes together to an incredibly satisfying experience, that is going to stick with me for a while.
Sifu is worth full price.