4.5/5 ★ – Oatmeal's review of Sifu.

Sifu is a cinematic marvel from the minimalist yet vibrant art style to the jaw dropping fluid animations. Only surpassed by the tight Kung fu gameplay which demands your strict attention to detail. Runs will start hard and progressively get easier as you master each area’s plan of attack. Unlocking shortcuts to bosses is a brilliant way to feed the player little rewards for fighting out a run until your very last breath. Who knows? You might just get that key card that’ll let you skip this chunk of combat on your path the level’s boss. This gameplay loop, intertwined with the game’s story as short cutscenes or lore items added to the detective board, incentivize the player to backtrack and attempt a level again in hopes of coming out alive and at a younger age than the previous best run. A mild criticism of the enemy’s fighting animation is that it can be hard to quickly decipher if their attack is avoidable high versus low versus left/right. I felt like I mostly got lucky until I really sat down to learn an enemy. But that’s what the game is meant to be. Which leaves the last, but by far the game’s most talked about, mechanic. The death counter; which increases by 1 every time you take enough damage to die and hold the rise button to get back up in the fight. The player will then age by the current death counter’s total up to past 70; at which point the player has one more life before a game over and starting the run over. This whole process is documented through your character’s visible aging on screen. With added beard and eventually grey hair. The style of the mechanic always matched the substance. All of Sufi’s elements come together in a masterful piece of GOTY material.