I’d much rather simply die and return to a check-point with all my progression intact than respawn where I died but only get a limited number of lives before starting over. You can still hone your skill just as much but with less tedium. I’d much rather play through more levels fewer times than fewer levels lots of times. In the same way that open worlds often end up padding the core of a video game with boring fetch quests and repetitive crafting and scavenging, the repetition in a roguelike starts to feel like a stand-in for actual content. I’m honestly just very tired of the roguelike craze. Here it’s just rinse and repeat, wade through all the myriad progression options, and then start over again and again. At least in a game like Returnal you’ll get some randomness and you can make serious headway with some of the game’s early unlocks. I have very little motivation to play the same level again and again. This is confusing and frustrating.Īnd it just gets tiresome after a while. Skills you unlocked and started playing with are gone, which means you can’t really rely on mechanics you had come to rely on in a previous run. Losing everything each time you age up and die means you’ll have to start over each run with only the basics at your disposal. Permanently unlocking skills is a tedious affair that requires you to purchase the same skill several times-without actually upgrading that skill in the process. Unless you permanently unlocked any of the skills you purchased in your previous runs, they’ll be gone. The aging mechanic has a downside: After 70, you’ll die for good and have to start over at the beginning of whichever stage you’re on with most of your progression wiped. It’s a shame that most of your progression is wiped away when your run is over, though at least once you complete a level and beat the boss you won’t have to play it again. There are a whole bunch of progression mechanics in Sifu. As you progress you’ll also encounter shrines that allow you to unlock various passive abilities and you can spend XP to unlock skills. As you age, your health bar decreases but your attacks get stronger. Your second death bumps you up to 23, then 26, then 30 and so on and so forth, tagging an extra year to your age after each death until you’re adding six or seven years at once. You start out as a 20-year-old and after your first death you age to 21.

Sifu early access