While it’s not necessarily described as a roguelike, martial arts action game Sifu does play quite similarly to one. Much like games such as Hades and Returnal, a game over means returning to the very beginning and losing any abilities unlocked along the way. Between the complex combat and harsh penalties for dying, some curious players may be hoping for difficulty options so they can curate their own, slightly more casual, experience to breeze through. But this will not be the case, at least not at launch.

Pierre Tano, executive producer at French studio Sloclap, which is developing and publishing Sifu for the PlayStation platforms and PC, recently spoke with MP1st about the game. When asked about the game’s difficulty, Tano says it’s entirely possible for a player to make it through the whole game without dying once, but it will require them to master the combat system.

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As a reminder, in Sifu, dying is not the immediate end. Upon death, the player character is resurrected on the spot, but they will have aged. Every death increases how many years the player ages by. And while an increase in age means an increase in strength, the player’s health will decrease with every revival. Once the player passes a certain age, they will die permanently and need to start over.

Tano explains how Sloclap wants to challenge and push players with Sifu’s combat. The aim is to encourage players to learn, improve, and adapt, with the immediate resurrection gimmick acting as a way to help new players since it allows them to fail at least a few times. But since the price of failure increases with every death, players will need to ultimately learn the ins and outs of the combat system if they want to complete the game.

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The lack of any difficulty options may put off some people from playing Sifu, but Tano hasn’t completely ruled out adding alternate difficulty options in the future. It wouldn’t be completely unprecedented; while Returnal never received different difficulty options, it was met with criticism for its save feature, as it was impossible to save mid-run. Developer Housemarque would eventually update the game to allow players to allow for exactly that, meaning runs can now be attempted across multiple sessions.

Difficulty in video games remains a hotly discussed topic, as some believe every game should offer difficulty options to allow more people to play them. In the case of something like Dark Souls, just as many argue that the brutal difficulty is the point and that it should be entirely up to developers whether or not to implement difficulty options.

Sifu releases for PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 on February 8th, 2022.

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Source: MP1st