Are There Difficulty Settings in Sifu?

Sifu is a difficult game. Like, really difficult. I don’t think I can overstate how absolutely nose-smashingly difficult this game is. You will learn the mechanics, and you will learn them perfectly, or you will get beaten within an inch of your life, and then past that last inch for good measure. After you get kicked to death enough times to angrily pound your desk into sawdust, you may wonder if there is any way to make this game any easier. So, are there difficulty settings in Sifu?

Are There Difficulty Settings in Sifu?

The answer to that question, unfortunately, is no. There is precisely one difficulty setting in Sifu, nothing easier, nothing harder. There is no way to tweak this difficulty in the game’s options, nor is there any particular way to cheese encounters, or at least none that anyone has yet discovered. If the developers have any intention of adding additional difficulty settings at any point post-release, they have not publicly disclosed this.

Rather than tweaking the overall difficulty of the game, the best way to make things easier in Sifu is, much like in real martial arts, to practice. Whenever you’re between levels in the Wuguan, you can interact with the Student’s training dummy in the main room to enter training mode. 

Training mode will give you an open space with one enemy you can practice combos, parries, dodges, and weapon usage. You can set the enemy to be either passive or aggressive depending on what kind of training you’re looking for, though in either case, the enemy will be immortal and solitary. Obviously, this kind of training will only get you so far, but it’s a low-pressure alternative to going into a level and getting your butt kicked (though you obviously will have to do that sooner or later).