In terms of total time, Sifu is pretty friendly to busy adults. Finishing the main story once and feeling like you “got it” usually lands in the 12–20 hour range, spread over a couple of weeks of evenings. Its structure also works well with typical 60–90 minute sessions: you pick a stage, make a few runs, maybe reach or beat the boss, then head back to the hub and stop. The main friction comes from the save behavior and the kind of skill it demands. You can’t save mid-stage, so you need to treat each run as a commit of up to an hour. And if you step away from the game for a few weeks, timings and muscle memory fade, making it harder to pick up where you left off. Sifu rewards playing in steady bursts over a shorter period rather than nibbling at it once a month.

Sifu asks a lot from your attention whenever you’re in a stage. Fights revolve around reading animation cues, tracking multiple enemies, and responding with the right defense or counter at the right moment. Even basic encounters can punish you if your mind drifts, and crowd fights in later levels hit hard if you lose track of someone off-screen. There’s no autopilot farming or long stretches of low-stakes walking where you can relax with a podcast. Instead, you’re almost always engaged with what’s happening directly in front of you. The hub and brief exploration sections offer short breathers, but most of your playtime is spent in high-focus combat. For a busy adult, that means Sifu is best when you have a clear block of time and relatively fresh brainpower. In exchange for this focus, you get crisp, responsive action where your decisions and reactions clearly matter in every moment.

Sifu has a real “training arc” built into it. At first, you’re just trying to stay alive, fumbling parries and dying to basic thugs. Over the first several sessions you’ll slowly internalize defensive options, recognize enemy animations, and remember a few key combos—and that’s when the game opens up. It doesn’t take months to reach basic competence, but it does take more time and repetition than a typical action game. The mechanics are tight enough that you clearly feel each bit of improvement: a boss that once felt impossible suddenly goes down without aging you, and an early stage becomes a stylish warm-up run. For players who enjoy that feeling of growth through practice, Sifu is incredibly rewarding. If you prefer games where you’re powerful almost immediately, the early hours here can feel like hitting your head against a wall before the switch finally flips.

Emotionally, Sifu sits in that space between thrilling and exhausting. The aging system turns every death into a visible cost, and watching your character jump several years because of one bad exchange is tense. Bosses and dense crowd encounters can spike your heart rate as you cling to a good run and know a few errors could send you back to the stage start. This isn’t horror intensity—there are no jump scares—but it is pressure intensity, the feeling of being tested over and over. For many players that’s a positive, even addictive kind of stress; for others, it’ll feel draining after a long workday. The game does offer quiet moments in the hub and the knowledge that each failure still teaches you something, which helps soften frustration. Still, you should go in expecting Sifu to get under your skin in a good way, not as a cozy, unwind-with-a-drink experience.