Sifu Launches on iOS and Android With Touch Controls Built for the Parries

Sifu is now live on iOS and Android, developer Sloclap (the Paris-based studio behind Absolver and the upcoming Rematch) announced today. The studio built the mobile port around touch controls meant to keep the timing-heavy parry system intact, along with an adaptive camera and streamlined environmental interactions for smaller screens. The full Sifu game page and our Sifu deal coverage from earlier this month (the PC version was $9.99) round out where Sifu sits in the market.

The press release is specific about the design intent: Sifu is built for mobile with “intuitive touch controls that preserve the depth of its combat” and “an adaptive camera tailored to smaller screens,” with Sloclap saying the goal is to “preserve the frenetic feeling of fighting your way through every encounter.” The mobile version drops players into the same fictional Chinese city as the original: a young martial artist witnesses the murder of their father, trains in Pak Mei Kung-Fu for eight years, and walks back into a cycle of revenge. Sloclap still frames Sifu as a blend of roguelike and beat-’em-up, where every death ages the protagonist and you have to master enemy weaknesses to break the loop. The painterly art direction and cinematic presentation from the console and PC versions carry over unchanged, the studio said.

A launch trailer is on the official YouTube channel, and the mobile adaptation is the latest entry in a long list of Sifu platforms. The game first hit PC in 2022, then PlayStation and Xbox the same year, and has since expanded to Nintendo Switch, including the Arenas Expansion (a wave-based survival mode that launched three years ago, with its own Nintendo Switch trailer on Nintendo of America’s channel). Sloclap is also working on the football action game Rematch.

This is a notable moment for mobile ports of premium indies. A few weeks after Ubisoft pulled the plug on Rainbow Six Mobile, a single-player brawler with no live-service cost is going the other way, onto phones, with no extra monetization attached. Sloclap did not announce pricing for the mobile version in the release.

Our read: Sifu’s parry-and-age mechanic is exactly the kind of thing that lives or dies by input feel. Sloclap has now ported Sifu to PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and now mobile over four years, and the Switch Arenas trailer from Nintendo of America showed the studio can keep the parry timing on a touch-and-stick platform. Mobile is the same kind of problem at smaller scale. If the studio nails the touch timing on a phone screen, the bus ride becomes a real training room. If it does not, the same difficulty curve that made the original famous will feel unfair instead of fair.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report