Post Script
What’s my age again? How Sifu makes getting old feel new
The trouble with getting old is that you don’t want it to happen. In Sifu, that is. Watching your character’s beard gradually form, lengthen and whiten might be the game’s single coolest idea, but in practice it’s also a sign things have gone wrong. Sharing progress with fellow reviewers, there’s a lot of lamenting our characters’ current ages. Too old for The Club, we moan, might as well be dead – just one of the many setups for an ‘and in the game’ punchline that had to be resisted in the writing of this Post Script.
Ultimately, ageing in Sifu might just be set-dressing for a pile of 1-ups or a stack of credits on the cabinet – there’s one moment when the camera shifts to a side-on view, a nod to Oldboy’s iconic corridor fight sequence that also helps position the game as a revival of the scrolling beat-’em-up. But it’s worth considering this idea in the context of modern games, and specifically the current golden age which work narrative justification into their handling of failure and repetition.
The most obvious example here is the recent trend for time loops, with attempts to take the fundamental looping structure of most action games and finding a narrative justification for it. And while your character’s ageing suggests the exact opposite, Sifu is a time-loop game, in a strange way. The game’s events take place across a single night, which you, the player, are rehearsing over and over, like the attempts of Bill Murray’s character to optimise the seduction of Andie MacDowell’s. (It’s a shame, in hindsight, that Sifu’s release date missed the actual Groundhog Day by about a week. But then so did the movie’s.)
But time loops aren’t the only solution here. In the case of Sifu there’s a fantastical conceit which explains why you can respawn, something that proves central to the plot. You could also look to Dark Souls, with all its Humanity and Hollow lore and themes of cycles, or the way BioShock works its VitaChamber respawn points into the eventual twist. And more recently, the game that might be the high watermark in this regard: Hades, a Roguelike elevated by a story that was served rather than undercut by its repeating nature.
The common factor here, of course, is death. Because what’s really going on, beneath the superficial similarities of these stories, is a long-term, industry-wide experiment in structure – of the mechanical rather than narrative kind. We’ve referenced two old models already, both born out of the practicalities of the arcade and both mostly resigned to history. (Even Mario doesn’t bother so much with the green mushrooms these days.) For a while, the default solution for singleplayer games was to keep the same linear forward momentum but simply remove the concept of finite ‘lives’.
But with the rise of the Soulslike and Roguelike formats, we’ve seen a growing amount of experimentation, in tandem with, and occasionally in opposition to, the widespread adoption of acquisitive progression systems. These are the two primary tools for sculpting a singleplayer game experience right now: death and progression. The interplay between the two has produced interesting results (in this very review section, you’ll find us wrestling with the results in the new Rainbow Six, not a series typically at the forefront of gaming innovation) and is sure to result in many more to come.
With all this in mind, it’s only natural that videogame storytelling would begin to follow suit. Sifu doesn’t go to the lengths of a Hades or Deathloop in its matching of story and structure, but it’s notable for finding a metaphor for failure that sidesteps death and traditional notions of progression, too: the beard becomes a symbol of failure, like looking in the mirror at the end of a week when you’ve repeatedly forgotten to shave. As a midpoint between these two opposing concepts, ageing is unexplored territory: neither death nor progression, but sort of both at once.