Developer Sloclap’s acclaimed martial arts adventure Sifu will – after a year of PlayStation and Epic Games Store exclusivity – be making its way to Xbox and Steam on 28th March.
Sifu, if you’ve not yet had the pleasure, is a third-person, single-player action game – focussed on intense hand-to-hand combat – that charts a young Kung Fu student’s quest for revenge following the murder of his family. It also features a magic pendant capable of resurrecting the protagonist on defeat, but he’ll grow older each time – meaning revival will eventually no longer be possible, but at least you get to keep any unlocked skills for another attempt.
Sifu was extremely well-recived when it launched last February, but some players found its extremely tough challenge a little too much to handle. Pleasingly, though, Sloclap took feedback on board and added new difficulty options several months in – and has continued updating the experience with new modifiers, systemss, and outfits since.
Eurogamer contributor Edwin Evans-Thirlwell called Sifu an “elegant martial arts meditation on temporality and self-possession” in his Recommended review last year, and players who’ve been patiently waiting for its release on Steam and Xbox will now get chance to see what all the fuss was about from 28th March.
Sifu’s leap to new platforms will coincide with the launch of a free Arenas expansion for all platforms apart from Switch (which’ll get it a “later date”), promising nine new locations and “45 merciless challenges spread over five game modes”. Sloclap reckons Areans will add around ten more hours of play to the base game’s runtime.
And if that’s not enough Sifu to be getting on with, December brought the news a live-action movie adaptation from John Wick writer Derek Kolstad is currently in the works.