izigame.me

Visually gorgeous, audially pleasing, with an engaging narrative threaded through a series of five medium-sized, action-packed locations.
The gameplay is very fast-paced and you will need to learn to parry and dodge with split-second-perfect timing. If you don't, you're just not beating some of the bosses. It's not going to happen.
Combat in general is very heavily weighted toward parrying and evading attacks - not to be confused with dodging away from attacks! What you need to do is to stand in one spot, blocking, and press left, right or down (which doesn't matter) to wiggle about on the spot and thus magically avoid most attacks, or up to do a little hop and avoid the low leg sweep attacks that enemies use JUST often enough that it's super annoying, but not often enough that you'll ever internalize the timing... especially as a lot of them just come out of nowhere, very quickly. I dunno, maybe I'm just getting old.
Anyway, there are attacks you can't really parry, clearly telegraphed in all fairness, they make enemy limbs glow when they're coming up so you know you need to evade. And whether you evade or parry an attack, or rather a series of attacks - enemy combos last until they're finished whaling on you, there's no such thing as interrupting enemy attacks. Well, on rare occasions, lesser enemies might be interrupted by a heavy staff thrust in the face. Bosses and mini-bosses? Generally not.
So, you're constantly evading and optionally parrying here and there to inflict some Structure damage to the enemy. You may know the term "Posture" from Souls games and Sekiro and the like; Structure is what they call that in Sifu. You run out of Structure, you get staggered and potentially take health damage, even if you were blocking. Blocking (parrying's lazy and mostly useless sibling) quickly drains your Structure with each hit blocked. It's better than letting them just hit you in the health, of course, but that's about all that can be said for it. Well, that and that if you see a low attack coming, it's better to just hold the block stance than to do a ducking evade as you would for most attacks - the block will still stop the low sweep and any knockdown, weapon dropping and health damage, assuming you have enough Structure for it, while the low evade will just straight-up get you hit. Like what happened to me. SO. MANY. TIMES. I just don't seem to have the rapid processing capacity to go "ah here comes a low attack, better move my evading finger to the up key and press it at the exact right moment" within the microsecond between seeing it coming, and getting hit.
Sifu is a game about getting hit. About losing health, and eventually dying, over and over and over again. It's usually not all that hard to get back to wherever you were, and you can always repeat earlier stages to practice your ability as a player, grind experience by beating up tons of dudes and dudettes, and gradually unlock a wide variety of moves that won't actually work on any bosses, as well as one or two moves that do. Get the environmental stool-kicking thing early, by the way, you won't regret it.
Anyway, after you finally figure out how to sometimes not get hit, you can parry and/or evade entire enemy combo sequences, leaving the enemy in a very brief (like, a third of a second long) state of vulnerability, where you may "punish" that enemy. This may or may not happen while another enemy is swinging a baseball bat in the direction of your head, but never mind that for now. Suppose it's one on one - in this situation, you can pick a thing to do, enter the commands for it at precisely the right moment, and hit the enemy while they're vulnerable. Cool, right?
Less cool is that you NEED to perform this sequence of defence-defence-defence-punish (and some enemy combos are longer than just the three hits, mind you!) for the vast majority of your abilities to inflict any damage. If you just try to punch dudes first, they'll just sort of auto-evade or auto-parry, repeatedly, and then launch an uninterruptible attack that hits you while your fists are still gently slamming into their untroubled face. So the gameplay is extremely focused on evading and punishing, for better or worse. Mostly worse, the further into the game you get. It's... not great.
Now and then you come across a jade dragon statue which restores your health and lets you pick a semi-permanent bonus. Depending on how well you do, you might age a lot or not at all, during the level; your lowest age record for each level saves a sort of checkpoint before the next one, including the statue upgrades you've gotten up to that point. This mostly doesn't matter, though; regular enemies are usually but not always vulnerable to being whacked or slashed with weapons you find around the levels or, more often, find wielded by people trying to kill you. Bosses typically have some form of defence against these, often a very quick zoom charge smash attack that knocks you down and disarms you. Or just being able to block all weapon attacks barehanded, unless you swing once or twice during a punish opportunity. And the upgrades are split between weapon upgrades, a useless death penalty wipe that you will never want or need, some upgrades for "Focus", a super attack mechanic with typically underwhelming power and which literally doesn't work at all on the final boss - you try to use it, and he just goes "ha ha, no". Same deal with throws. "Never try that again!" Well, shit, game, I thought we had some established mechanics... guess all those tutorials were just messing with me! Well, I never really used throws in the first place, just thought I'd try them on the off chance. Not much works on the final boss, you see, it's a frigging slog of a fight. And the guy is constantly hurling confusingly reasoned mockery throughout.
Therein lies Sifu's greatest failing, I fear; it likes to make you feel small for the slightest mistake, to have the enemies belittle you at every opportunity, even as you're smashing their stupid smug faces into the floor. Catharsis is but a breath away, and then they fart the abusively repetitive dodge mechanics in your face just one more time. They make you run through the whole gauntlet of goons so you can practice the boss one more time. They give you a shortcut to the boss, but that costs you a dragon statue. There's always some damn thing they could have just not been jackoffs about, but they chose to jerk you around instead.
Sifu is a great, mechanically almost perfect, beautiful game that is stressful and uncomfortable to play, and that I would not give nor recommend to any of my friends, nor ever want to play again. Nice try, but apply yourselves a little more next time, Sloclap. Maybe bring in a few external testers for the timing, y'all made a game for a lightning god or possibly a jittery drug addict.