Musings on... Punch Club

What a strange little game this is. 

The elevator pitch for Punch Club is ‘The Sims meets Fight Club’. Sounds pretty interesting, right? When I first heard about it (on the excellent Gamers with Jobs podcast), I was intrigued by the reviewer’s description: an indie RPG, in which you play an up-and-coming fighter, complete with retro graphics and music. Looking back, there was one tidbit in the review which was crucial, even if I didn’t realize it then: the reviewer was only a couple of hours in.

Lots of apparently simplistic indie games can have a fun first couple of hours, then hook you for another ten or twenty in the initial burst: FTL, Hotline Miami, and so on. Punch Club isn’t so shoulders-grabbing-ly addictive as those two gems, but it’s diverting and enjoyable enough in its early stages. The opening cut scenes are gorgeously directed, and ably set the tone for a knowingly bizarre, OTT story: something about becoming the world’s greatest fighter so you can avenge your murdered father, taking down a gang of thieves, hunting down a magical medallion… It’s not important.

The basic mechanics are that you have three main attributes: strength, agility and stamina. Working out in the gym will boost specific attributes depending on the type of exercise you do: the bench press increases your strength, the punching bag your agility, the treadmill your stamina. You’re quickly asked to choose from one of three fighting styles, each of which focuses on utilizing one of those attributes: basically a strength build, agility build or stamina build.

Here are the two kickers. One: the higher a particular attribute is, the harder it is to increase. Fine. That’s a common enough mechanic in RPGs. Two: at the end of each in-game day, you drop points in each attribute, losing more if your rank is higher. Not fine. This doesn’t seem like a big deal to begin with, but by the late game you’re literally spending entire days working out while barely inching upwards in a single attribute, as the others either stay at the same level or drop. Any side-quests that you haven’t completed by that stage quickly fall by the wayside; you simply can’t afford to waste time on them, or it’ll cost you five, ten, fifteen real-world minutes.

The fights themselves – which come thick and fast in the early game, before slowing to a trickle later on – are, I suppose, the most entertaining parts of the game. You don’t actually… do much, though. You simply pick the moves your fighter will use, click Fight, and watch the ‘action’ unfold (two low-res men bobbing up and down, and either punching, kicking, or missing each other).

After each fight you gain points (more if you win) to spend in the game’s tech-tree. The strength, agility and stamina paths each have their own specific abilities. Again, early on in the game deciding which abilities in which to invest your hard-earned points is quite entertaining. Then you start to lose. And lose, and lose, and lose. 

And then you go on the internet, because you figure out pretty quickly you must be doing something wrong. You look on a thread called ‘Punch Club: Why Do I Keep Losing?’, and find that there is a very specific set of abilities that actually succeed for each build. Subsequently, that previous allure of choice is snatched away, to be replaced by an arduous grind towards getting the ‘right’ abilities.

This game doesn’t so much have a difficulty curve as a difficulty mountain. You amble along in your first few fights, winning some, losing some. Then you lose every fight you enter. Over time you build enough points up to get the best abilities, and then you win every fight you enter. Seeing as it’s also not always clear what individual abilities actually do, especially when you’re using four or five of them at once, you rarely get the satisfying feeling of having outsmarted your opponent. That’s something that RPGs thrive on; its absence is a problem, to say the least.  

Finally, a note on grinding (the gaming kind; there are more useful people to ask about your dance moves in the club). Because eventually, after you’ve got all the abilities you need, and when you’ve graduated through the rookie league, the street fighting and the Fight Club bit, you enter a section of the game in which that’s basically all you do. You have the right abilities, but your attributes aren’t high enough to win yet. So you go into the gym, and you stay there all day, cycling between the same four machines, day after day after day.

Some games are ‘music games’, and others are ‘podcast games’. 

In some games, what you’re doing might be repetitive, but it’s still kind of engaging: you listen to music because most of your concentration is still devoted to the game, and the tunes are just background noise. 

In other games you need a podcast to divert you. You still want to finish the game, but you need a podcast to keep on playing, or you’d end up walloping yourself over the head with your keyboard just for something to do. Punch Club went from a ‘just-playing-the-game’ game to a ‘podcast game’ faster than you can say ‘Day 204 is Over: Minus 362pts to Agility’. The final section of the game was the most interminably dull grind to which I’ve ever submitted myself.

Does anyone actually enjoy grinding? Probably not, but lots of people still do it because there are actual, satisfying rewards on offer. You killed 1000 goblins? Guess what; now you can turn into a dragon. In Punch Club the grind seems endless, and at no point is there anything that approaches a proportional payout. Finally you get your attributes to the requisite level, and… you destroy all of the biggest fights in the game. The End.

I spent a significant amount of time with Punch Club asking myself the simple question, ‘Am I enjoying this?’ One school of thought would be that if you have to ask yourself the question, the answer is no. I wouldn’t agree with that, however. I don’t ‘enjoy’ losing on FIFA (it happens occasionally), but I still love the game. A more apt example is Diablo 3. It’s similarly grind-heavy – you must kill thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of minions in the endless quest for better loot, and cooler abilities – and yet even if I didn’t ‘love’ that game, I look back on my time with it fondly.

Sometimes you have to finish a game before you know the answer to the aforementioned question. In this case, I didn’t. I figured it out six hours in, then forced myself to keep playing for another six hours.

You can probably guess what it was.