There’s been a deluge of interesting indie titles revealed over the last few months, one of which is Sifu. The game is a stylish homage to kung fu films, where you take on the role of a person out for revenge. We’ve seen lots of videos of the unique and punchy combat, and also an interesting mechanic that ages you slowly as you die. Now we have a little more context about how that works, as well as new details about why the game suffered a recent delay.
The title received a new trailer at today’s State of Play, which you can see in full here. There the main highlight was this aging mechanic. Developer SloClap took to the official PlayStation blog to add some context. As the new trailer basically shows, dying ages you up after each ‘death’ in-game and you begin at your new age. That aging is not indefinite however. Eventually, once you get to a certain age and die, you will have to start over. It’s unclear if that means you’ll have to start from the very beginning of the game similar to other roguelikes, or if there is section breaks.
The game’s delay was also due to COVID, unsurprisingly. “The Covid crisis and the subsequent lockdowns have been a huge challenge for everyone, and although we were lucky enough not to face the important revenue losses that many businesses have gone through, the situation did create some real challenges for us,” the developer wrote. “Since March 2020 we have had to adapt to changing regulations, switching the whole team to remote working while we continued our development work, and we lost some velocity as a consequence – remote working has its advantages, but losing daily informal interactions between team members can also be hard to manage.
“We still felt earlier this year that we could make our original planned launch date, but as the deadline grew closer, it became clear that we wouldn’t be able to do so without putting the quality of the game at risk or creating huge pressure on the Sloclap team – and neither of these options were acceptable to us.”
You can read the post in full through here.
Sifu will release sometime in early 2022 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and PC.